Oof it’s been a month. Nobody wants to read about a blogger’s personal life outside of the topic of interest, so I won’t bore you, but lately Saturday mornings (when I write) have been… unavailable. Apologies for that.
Writing about Barrell is weird for me. From a costs perspective, there’s very little difference between a cask strength bourbon from a major producer like Barton that sells for $45 and something like Barrell Batch 017 which sells for upwards of $90. They’re both not super-old… most bourbons aren’t much older than 9 or 10 years, as the wide temperature swings in rickhouses where bourbons are aged tends to make them overly woody tasting much after 10 years. There’s no difference in the input ingre
When someone asks me to recommend a single malt scotch, the name “Glen Moray” does not pop immediately to mind. Why not? It’s a malt whisky distillery in its own right, just like heavy-hitters Glenfiddich and The Macallan. It may be smaller, but I recommend small distilleries like Oban all the time. So why not Glen Moray?
Since I got yelled at a few weeks ago for reviewing Jim Beam’s original “White Label” bourbon without thoroughly panning it, I thought I’d double down and review Beam’s Double Oak edition. Yes I’ve been planning to use that joke since I bought the bottle. Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.
Mortlach has, once again, revamped its range. It has replaced the Rare Old (NAS) bottling with this new age-stated 12 year as the “entry” dram. While I do applaud the use of a 12 year malt as the entry-level bottle for a distillery’s official range, I’m not crazy about any “entry level” bottling starting at $55. But no distillery has yet asked me for pricing advice, so onward we plunge.
I should really title this post “Musings on Sauternes as it relates to whisky,” or, “Random utterances designed to shirk my responsibility to write a real review post.” But… you know, that’s pretty long. I don’t know much about Sauternes, the French wine. I know it’s made from three white-wine grapes (Sémillon, muscadelle, and sometimes …
Heh. Surly Rye. Heh. *cough*
I’m in a weird mood about this blog lately, between hecklers in the comments and real life responsibilities getting in the way, so I thought I’d take this week’s blog post and have a little fun with it. Everyone online right now is talking about ChatGPT, an AI LLM (large language model) with a user-friendly chat interface. So, I thought, why not ask it to write my blog post for me?
My past reviews of Redemption’s Straight Rye boil down to: “sufficient for cocktails”. Redemption sources whiskey from MGP – formerly known as LDI – in Indiana, like a vast number of other products on the shelf today, and hasn’t had any post-maturation embellishments (cask finishes, extra aging, etc.). The same is true of this “High-Rye” Bourbon, which is a fairly standard MGP recipe of 60% corn, 36% rye, and 4% barley (for enzymes). This straight bourbon is aged by law for a minimum of two year
I know I just reviewed a Kirkland malt recently, but this one caught my eye and I wanted to get a review up in case anyone is standing – right this moment – in a Costco looking, puzzled, at this very label and wondering whether they should buy it.