Bottom-Shelf Brackets 2019: Round 1: Jim Beam Repeal Batch vs. Evan Williams Single Barrel and Buffalo Trace vs. Old Forester Signature

The time is finally here! Let’s get down to the competitions. Round 1 of the 2019 BourbonGuy.com Bottom Shelf Brackets opens with Division 1 Number 3 seed Evan Williams Single Barrel (2011 vintage) versus Number 6 seed Jim Beam Repeal Batch. 

This is a battle of Limited Edition Releases. Jim Beam’s Repeal Batch is a non-chill filtered, slightly higher proof version of the standard Jim Beam White. It was released to celebrate the 85th Anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. Evan Williams Single Barrel is a limited release only in that each new release is named for the year that the bourbon was put in oak. For many years this was released after 10 years in the barrel. These days you are down to a little under 8 years. Which Limited Release will win out? Let’s find out!

These were tasted blind in the following order. Tasting notes are from before the reveal.

Jim Beam Repeal Batch

Purchase Info: $18.99 for a 1 liter bottle, Total Wine, Burnsville, MN

Details: Non-chill filtered. 43% ABV.

Nose: Melon, cinnamon, mint, caramel corn.

Mouth: Spearmint, wintergreen, baking spice and caramel.

Finish: Medium length with lingering vanilla corn and mint.

Evan Williams Single Barrel (2011 vintage)

Purchase Info: $24.99 for a 750 mL bottle, Viking Liquor Barrel, Prior Lake, MN

Details: 7 years 10 months old. 43.3% ABV.

Nose: Caramel, cinnamon, wintergreen.

Mouth: Thin mouthfeel. Almond, brown sugar, baking spice and a light mint.

Finish: On the longer side of medium and warm. Lingering almond, berry and spice.

Pre-reveal Thoughts: Whiskey two (Evan Williams Single Barrel) is the clear winner here. The nose and mouth are richer and the finish is much more satisfying.

Post Reveal Thoughts: No upset here, the higher seed (and higher age) wins in this one. Evan Williams Single Barrel is moving on to face corporate cousin Larceny in Round 2

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In order to finish this competition sometime before summer, we are doing two in each post. So moving on to our second 3v6 matchup, we have Division 2 Number 3 seed Buffalo Trace versus Number 6 seed Old Forester Signature. 

This match-up lands squarely on the shoulders of you, the readers. Buffalo Trace is the higher seed due to more people nominating it even though it is the lower proof bourbon. Buffalo Trace is the namesake product of the Sazerac-owned Buffalo Trace Distillery. The distillery is located in Frankfort, Kentucky and is claimed by the company to be the oldest continuously-operating distillery in the United States. If you haven’t been there you owe it to yourself to make sure that you do. Far from being the oldest distillery, the Old Forester Distillery is one of the youngest. Though that doesn’t matter much since almost none of the juice that will be going into Old Forester bottles (one day) is produced there. All of the juice in this bottle having been produced in Brown-Forman’s Shively distillery.

These were tasted blind in the following order. Tasting notes are from before the reveal.

Buffalo Trace

Purchase Info: $24.99 for a 750 mL bottle, Viking Liquor Barrel, Prior Lake, MN

Details: 45% ABV.

Nose: Vanilla, caramel, Cheerios cereal, a hint of green apples.

Mouth: Spicy and warm with brown sugar, baking spice, berries and apples.

Finish: Medium length with lingering vanilla, berries and baking spice.

Old Forester Signature 100 Proof

Purchase Info: $24.99 for a 750 mL bottle, Total Wine, Burnsville, MN

Details: 50% ABV.

Nose: Hickory, caramel, wintergreen, almond.

Mouth: Spicy and warm with vanilla, oak, green apple, clove and cinnamon.

Finish: Spicy and of medium length. Lingering brown sugar, spice, apple and wintergreen.

Pre-reveal Thoughts: This one was a very difficult matchup. In the end, whiskey two won on the strength of its finish. The spice must flow.

Post Reveal Thoughts: And just like that we have our first upset of the competition. Proof won out in this case. Old Forester Signature is moving on to match up against Evan Williams Bottled in Bond in Round 2.

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6th Annual BourbonGuy.com Bottom-Shelf Brackets: Reader's Choice Edition

As it is March, it is probably time for brackets of one sort or another. And even though my beloved Minnesota Gophers will actually make an appearance in a basketball tournament this year...I still don't really care. I mean, I'm happy to hear they are doing ok, but it isn't going to ruin my day should they not beat Louisville. 

No, once again it is time to get our fill of competitive bracketing by finding inexpensive bourbons and pitting them against each other head-to-head to see if there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest. Normally I run all over the Metro trying to find bourbons that fulfill a stringent set of qualifications while minimizing bourbons from the same producer. But this year, I decided to be lazy…errr…crowd-source the decision by opening the nomination process up to you, the readers.

And boy did the nominations roll in (it might have helped that I asked the question as part of couple different give-aways). It’s funny, a couple of years ago, I got chastised in the comments for having an elevated Bottom-Shelf. But let me tell you, ya’ll have a much more high-end bottom shelf than I do.

So how does this competition work? Well, the bourbons included were all nominated by the readers. After the nomination process, I tallied the number of nomination each bourbon received, cross referenced that with bourbons I could buy for less than $25 (750 mL bottle or larger) and figured out which of those were actually available in my market.

And it was at that point that I realized there were way too many interesting suggestions for an eight bourbon bracket. So this year we are bracketing it NFL-style with 12 whiskeys, the top four seeds of which have earned first-round byes. Which leads me to how these were seeded. I have a very precise algorithm which I …

nah. I just went by the number of nominations each bourbon got. After that I broke any ties first by age and then by proof. The divisions were chosen in alternating order so Division 1 chose the top seed as first, then Division 2 got to choose the second seed first and so on down the line. And now, the moment you were waiting for:

The number one overall seed, with 5 nominations and 103 proof is Heaven Hill’s Fighting Cock. Following that with the number one seed in Division 2, also with 5 nominations, is Wild Turkey 101. The third overall seed and the number two seed in Division 2 is Evan Williams Bottled in Bond (four nominations and 100 proof). Following that as the number two seed in Division 1 is Larceny (Four nominations and 92 proof). The number three seeds are Evan Williams Single Barrel (Division 1, three nominations, 7 years old) and Buffalo Trace (Division 2, three nominations, 90 proof). Number four seeds are Four Roses Bourbon (Division 2, three nominations, 80 proof) and Jim Beam Bonded (Division 1, two nominations, 100 proof). Number 5 seeds are Old Grand-Dad Bonded (Division 1, two nominations, 100 proof) and Bulleit Bourbon (Division 2, two nominations, 90 proof). There were a lot of suggestions that only had one nomination, so I chose ones I thought might be interesting as the number six seeds. They are Old Forester Signature (Division 2, one nominations, 100 proof) and Jim Beam Repeal Batch (Division 1, one nominations, 100 proof).

There are a lot of interesting story lines this time (that tends to happen when you elevate the level of competition). We start out with Jim Beam Bonded versus Old Grand-Dad Bonded. Which of the two Beam Bourbon recipes will win out? We also have Four Roses versus Bulleit. So we have a Four Roses product versus one that used to be mostly Four Roses, but is no longer so. And honestly, I’m curious to see how the Beam Limited Release fares against the Heaven Hill Limited Release in Repeal Batch versus Evan Williams Single Barrel. And if Evan Williams wins, which of the Heaven Hill Bourbon recipes will win out? The wheat or the rye based?

Anyway competition starts Thursday. Check back then to see which of the bourbon in the Reader’s Choice Bottom-Shelf comes out on top!

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Basil Hayden's 10 Year Old: A perfectly acceptable $30 bourbon.

In the amazing and still missed TV show Justified, Raylan Givens gives one of the best lines of all time:

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.”

So when I noticed that the neighbor dog, who I love dearly, was one of the many things that was irritating me, I realized that today I was “the asshole." I had the brief thought that I should just take a break from work and write tonight’s post on the spot. Asshole seemed like the right frame of mind to be in for tonight’s whiskey. But then I remembered a line from His Holiness the Dalai Lama’ March 7th, 2014 address to the US Senate (you’ve probably seen this as inspirational #content on Instagram or Facebook numerous times):

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” 

This is a very poetic and less crude version of the mantra I live by: “Don’t be a dick.” Yes, I just compared myself to both the Dalai Lama and to Raylan Givens. No, I do not feel bad about it.

So I decided to put off writing tonight’s post until my frame of mind was more amenable to being kind. I’m sorry. I’m sure that one would have been much funnier.

Basil Hayden’s 10 Year Old

Purchase Info: $59.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Viking Liquor Barrel, Prior Lake, MN

Details: 40% ABV. 10 year age statement

Nose: Green apple Jolly Rancher candy, cinnamon, spearmint.

Mouth: Gentle. This is an easy one to hold in your mouth to try to tease out all the flavor notes. I got Custard, mint, cinnamon, and maybe some oak if I’m feeling generous.

Finish: Gentle and on the shorter side of medium. I get mint, spice and some oak.

Thoughts: This bourbon is fine. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this except the price. This is a perfectly acceptable $25-30 bourbon. The travesty is that it sells for twice that.

In the past, I have excused the price of the original Basil Hayden. I had the thought that it was less of a cash grab for underproofed bourbon and more a brilliant way to get new bourbon drinkers into the fold. Knowing, from my own experiences that people new to any liquor category, at least those that don’t live on the bottom shelf, want “something good” to try out and also knowing that for most uniformed people “something good” actually means “something with a pretty bottle that has a bit of a higher price tag,” it stands to reason that this new-to-bourbon person might grab a bottle of super gentle Basil Hayden with it’s higher price and pretty bottle. Then after trying it—and not being scared off by the “burn”—maybe find they enjoy it. And then eventually move on to real bourbon.

And that probably worked when there weren’t so many crap bourbons in pretty bottles on your local shelf with a price tag over $50. These days, original Basil Hayden can be one of the less expensive of the “pretty bottle crowd.” I saw it on sale for less than $30 as I was researching its local price tonight and have seen it that low (and bought it) in the past. So I thought Beam was reacting to the changing market by correcting the price downward. With the recent brand expansions, we have seen that is not the case. Original Basil Hayden may be cheaper these days, but all the new ones that share its name are not. And the worst offender is this 10 year old version. Like I said earlier, this is a perfectly acceptable bourbon. In fact, I wish more of the Old Grand Dad line had this kind of barrel influence on it. But the flavor is comparable to Buffalo Trace or maybe Henry McKenna Bottled in Bond. Notice I said flavor, not heat or complexity. This suffers from the same issue that Original Basil Hayden’s has: it’s too gentle and low proof for the price, but this doesn’t have the excuse of being a “gateway” bourbon.

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Knob Creek Twice Barreled Rye

Did I miss the memo letting everyone know that the new hotness was putting your rye whiskey into a second new barrel for finishing? Sure, I ran across one this fall, but it was a distillery-only release. It came in half bottles that sold for $50 each. That was a company playing around and stumbling upon something good. Cool, right?

But then, I started seeing reports that Beam was doing something extremely similar as a limited release in the Knob Creek line. Two data points isn’t a trend, but it could be the beginning of a trend. I mean, finishing your whiskey in a second barrel is nothing new. People have been doing that for years. But finishing it in a second, new barrel? Well, that’s new. At least to my limited memory. I mean, barrels are expensive. And sure, the big guys can resell them for somewhere around the price they bought them for, but still that seems like a serious outlay of cash.

So what are they getting for that extra expense? Well, think of it this way. A new charred oak barrel is like a basket full of freshly ground coffee beans. They smell good, they are full of flavor and they impart that flavor to the liquid that is interacting with them. But once you use them? Well most of that flavor is gone. Ever been so tired that you accidentally made today’s coffee with yesterday’s grounds? Yeah. Barrels are kinda like that too. Only in this case, they are running that metaphorical coffee through a new set of grounds imparting even more of that flavor to the resulting liquid.

Hmmm…I wonder if that would work? I love coffee, it might be the one thing I love more than whiskey.

Anyway, the result for both of the double-barreled whiskeys from this week was to impart a richness that was lacking in the standard releases. After tasting each of them side-by-side with their respective standard release rye, I’d say that running these particular whiskeys though the barrel again definitely had an effect. But did in Knob Creek’s case, did it make it better?

Knob Creek Twice Barreled Rye

Purchase Info: $49.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Ace Spirits, Hopkins, MN

Details: 50% ABV

Nose: Black pepper, dried fruit, and cloves

Mouth: Spicy and sweet with black pepper, clove, cinnamon, apricot, maple, caramel, honey, and oak.

Finish: Spicy and warm. Medium length. Lingering cinnamon and clove along with a fruity sweetness.

Thoughts: This is good. I like it much better than the standard release Knob Creek Rye. Of course, since I am finding my self falling further and further out of love with the Knob Creek Rye, is that really saying anything? In this case, yeah, it is. Lately I’m finding standard Knob Creek Rye to be very grain forward and since there is a hefty portion of corn in there, unfortunately, one of the grains that is coming through the most is corn. That kinda defeats the purpose of a rye to me. If I want a high rye bourbon, I’ll buy one. When I want a rye, I’d rather have one that tastes more of rye than bourbon.

And in a way, this is also very bourbony. There is a lot of the bourbon-like sweetness coming through. Luckily, in this case it is in the form of maple, caramel and honey, not grain flavors. And that really does make a difference as I think the sweetness helps complement the typical “rye” flavors that you would expect in a rye whiskey. There is also a richness that is severely lacking in standard Knob Creek Rye. All in all, I’m a fan. At the price, I’m not sure I’ll be buying a second bottle. But I don’t regret buying the first.

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Jim Beam Repeal Batch

Last year, on a particularly cold negative twenty degree (Fahrenheit) night, I put a glass of 80° proof whiskey out on the deck to see how it would react to the extreme cold of a Minnesota winter and if it would start to freeze. Mostly, it did nothing. It got a little syrupy but it’s not like it started to crystalize or anything. I was a little disappointed but only a little. I started my college education, way back in the pre-commercial internet days, studying science so I am well versed in the idea that a hypothesis (especially one that is backed by scant actual info) often doesn’t stand up to experimental trials.

Why would I leave a glass of whiskey outside overnight? Well, mostly because I was curious. I wanted to know what happens as alcohol reaches it’s freezing point (roughly -17°F at 80 proof). Especially if that alcohol is bourbon. And since negative twenty doesn’t happen too often I thought that was my chance to find out. Maybe it didn’t get that cold, or maybe alcohol starts to gel before freezing. No idea. But it was interesting to observe. If this winter gets that cold, I’ll probably try again. It would be interesting to try frozen whiskey.

It is that same curiosity that led me to a certain thought when I first saw that Jim Beam was coming out with a non-chill filtered. We’ve all learned that bourbons are chill-filtered because at a lower proof there is the possibility of a cloudiness occurring if it gets too cold. This is deemed to be a turn-off to customers (I’d guess rightly so). And so the producers pre-chill the bourbon to filter that cloudiness out. But, the follow-up thought also says that chill-filtered bourbon also removes some of the flavor. And so it is fitting that, with a limited edition bourbon, a company would skip that step and give geeks what they are clamoring for, even if it is at a lower proof.

Of course, the first thing I thought of was if I could make that cloudiness happen. I’ve never seen it and I would like to. Why? Curiosity, I guess. But then I went and finished the bottle before thinking about it. Maybe I’ll have to get get another one.

Jim Beam Repeal Batch

Purchase Info: $17.99 for a 750 ml bottle, Liquor Barn Jefferson Commons, Louisville, KY. Available locally starting at $18.99 for a one liter bottle.

Details: 43% ABV. Non-Chill filtered.

Nose: Peanut Brittle, dried leaves

Mouth: Peanut, baking spice and a hint of mint.

Finish: Gentle with a long lasting unsalted peanut note.

Thoughts: This is a limited edition whiskey. Is it worth grabbing instead of other Beam products? To find out, I picked up a little Beam White label and Beam Black label. It found that this has a nose that is more similar to Beam Black than it is to Beam White, though not as woody as Black Label. The mouth is a sweeter and smoother version of Beam White. It doesn’t show the sharp wood flavors that Beam White often does. I’d say that if you were to view the difference between Beam White and Beam Black on a spectrum, that this would fall somewhere on the one quarter mark (on the Beam White side).

Should you buy it? If you are a Beam fan, yes. Even if it is just for curiosity’s sake. In a vacuum, it is pretty meh. But it is a better version of Beam White and due to the price, I might pick up a liter for use in cocktails. Or for experimentation’s sake.

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Little Book 2018: Chapter 2 "Noe Simple Task"

Tonight I am drinking a true FrankenWhiskey. And, not to spoil the results for you, but I love it. Released by Beam Suntory, Little Book is a label that celebrates unique whiskey blends. It's, to quote the label, "crafted by Freddie Noe," son of Jim Beam Master Distiller Fred Noe. I've never met the younger Mr. Noe, but I have to say I like what he's doing with Little Book.

Last year's Little Book was a blend of bourbon, corn, rye and malt whiskeys ranging from 4 to 13 years old. I...never tried it. For some reason, it just didn't interest me. Maybe it was the malt whiskey. Adding malt whiskey to something is usually a sign that I won't care for it. In any case, I passed on it. I sort of regret that now...

This year's, however, was a different animal altogether. It blends 8-year-old Kentucky Straight Rye whiskey with two different Canadian Whiskies. A 13-year-old Canadian Rye with a 40-year-old Canadian whiskey made from corn. I have been house blending US and Canadian Ryes at home for quite a while and was really looking forward to seeing what a company with access to nearly unlimited stocks could come up with. And when I saw it at Total Wine for less than $75, I pounced on it.

Little Book 2018: Chapter 2 "Noe Simple Task"

Purchase Info: $73.99 for a 750 mL at Total Wine, Burnsville, MN

Details: 59.40% ABV. Blend of 8-year-old Kentucky Straight Rye whiskey, 13-year-old Canadian Rye, and 40-year-old Canadian whiskey.

Nose: Cinnamon, nutmeg, candle wax, non-specific wood.

Mouth: Nice and spicy with good heat. Cinnamon carries over to the mouth with a honey sweetness and dried fruit notes backing it up.

Finish: Spicy and long with cinnamon, rye spices, mint, honey and dried fruit.

Thoughts: I saw some people in online comments bashing this for using Canadian whisky. As far as I’m concerned, those people are very wrong as the Canadian whiskies are the ones that are providing most of the flavor. This is a well crafted whiskey that has a lot of the Canadian rye flavors with the spicy brashness of a US-style rye. It’s fantastic. Spicy and bold with a great mouthfeel. I think I’m in love.

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A collaboration with Jim Beam: Budweiser Reserve Copper Lager

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Hey, I redesigned the site! After having the same design through two different content management systems (the second of which I wrote CSS to look like a template on the first), I’ve decided that it was time to give the site a little facelift. Allow more room for images, get rid of a few dated design elements, things like that.

And now, if you are a reader of this blog who primarily reads it on your mobile device, you are now being treated to something that desktop readers have been (probably) ignoring for years. That would be the site’s tagline. I kept the same one for the first 5 years or so, until I notice that Josh over at the Whiskey Jug was using essentially the same one (we both started our sites about the same time and came up with it independently).

Since that discovery, I have decided to make things a little more topical. I couldn’t come up with just one that I wanted to use to sum up the site, so I change them up whenever the mood strikes me. For example, the current one is “October is a spooky time. Fortify yourself with a little bourbon.” Which means I will need to remember to change it at the end of October…

But it is also a great lead in to tonight’s review. I’m straying a little from the whiskey I typically cover tonight to talk about something that is “whiskey adjacent.” I’m taking about beer. And not just any beer, a beer that has been co-branded between Budweiser and Jim Beam. It’s not “barrel-aged” per se. The language that they use in the press release is “aged on Jim Beam bourbon barrel staves.” But some of the flavors of a barrel-aged beer do come through. Overall, it’s a respectable beer. I read somewhere that if it had been released under one of AB-InBev’s “craft” labels that people would be raving about it. I have to agree. This is a good beer and well worth picking up a six-pack to try. But, let’s get onto the more formal review, shall we?

Budweiser Reserve Copper Lager

Purchase Info: $13.99 for a 12-pack of bottles at Total Wine, Burnsville, MN

Details: 6.2% ABV. Aged on Jim Beam Bourbon Barrel Staves

Visual: Lovely copper color

Nose: Caramel, a light booziness, and classic Budweiser biscuity notes.

Mouth: Sweet with caramel and malt, nutty, a mild booziness. Notes of nuts, cooked rice and oak linger.

Thoughts: I’m going to admit something here. I do not hate Budweiser products. Even as a fan of craft beer, Bud Light is my “yard work beer” of choice. At the same time, I tend to dislike barrel-aged beers. They are typically too sweet, too strong, and too heavy for me to want to finish more than a couple sips. This splits the difference between the two. It is lighter than a typical barrel-aged beer but is much more flavorful than a Budweiser, even while retaining some of the Budweiser flavors. This beer just works. I like it. On Untapped I gave it a 3 out of 5, which is what I use when I like something, but am not is a real hurry to buy more when the amount I have is gone. As I said above, it’s worth picking up to give it a try.

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Booker's Bourbon: Batch 2018-03 "Kentucky Chew"

It’s the last post of Bourbon Heritage Month. Tonight we finish up the month by revisiting a bourbon that was provided to me specifically to coincide with Bourbon Heritage Month.

I state in my Statement of Ethics that if I accept a review sample, I will disclose it at the beginning of the article. Please consider it disclosed. I’d like to thank Jim Beam for providing this sample to me with no strings attached. As always, all thoughts are just my opinion and should be taken as just that.

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Do you ever get the feeling that life is flying by? That maybe life is too short to hold grudges? I do, and I have for a while. For some reason, that doesn’t seem to stop me from holding a few grudges anyway. Which seemed odd to me, until I come to the realization that I’d been hiding the grudge, even from myself. Let me set the stage for you.

It was 2016. I, like many bourbon lovers, had been getting frustrated by the rising prices and disappearing age statements for a while. It felt like one punch in the gut after another as one previously affordable bourbon after another either disappeared, lost their identity (age), or just plain became priced out of reach. Affordable luxury was how I, and many others, had always thought of bourbon. And then the announcement of the 2017 Booker’s Price Increase (from $59.99 to $99.99) came. There was understandable anger. It had been communicated in such a way that almost made it sound as if the near doubling of the price was being done just because they could.

But the company either changed their mind or their messaging (maybe both) and though a price increase was still there, it wasn’t as big. It was actually reasonable. From an MSRP of $59.99 to somewhere between $69.99 and $74.99 wasn’t terrible considering the newly supplied explanation of constrained supplies and reduced numbers of batches. Unlike many others, I wasn’t angry. That’s capitalism, I thought. They are free to charge what they want and I am free to either buy it or not based on if I think the price is fair.

But unfortunately, even though I thought that the latter price increase wasn’t too bad, a funny thing had occurred: the first announcement stuck in my head. And as such, in my mind, Booker’s moved from an affordable luxury at $50-60 (depending on the retailer) to a bottle that was priced in the range of limited edition bourbons that I only bought once per year or less.

It wasn’t true, but that’s what I mean about hiding the grudge from myself. Obviously just by looking at the shelf I knew that I wasn’t going to need to drop a hundred bucks on a bottle. But for some reason, I never thought of it because that $99.99 price was stuck in my brain along with the hard feelings that came with how it had been originally communicated.

But time passes. Grudges, even hidden ones, lose their sharp edges. And when the PR folks for Beam Suntory reached out to me to see what I was planning to do for Bourbon Heritage Month and offered a review sample of Booker’s, I took it. It had been a few years since I had purchased one and I thought it might be nice to see how it was coming along.

This particular batch was named for the now famous “Kentucky Chew” method of evaluating a bourbon originally made famous by the brand’s namesake Booker Noe. It is essentially the practice of moving the bourbon all around your mouth so it gets into all the little nooks and crannies, with the effect of making it looking like you’re chewing your bourbon. The batch was released in August 2018.

Booker’s Bourbon: Batch 2018-03 “Kentucky Chew”

Purchase Info: This sample was graciously provided by Beam Suntory. The suggested retail price is between $69.99 and $74.99 for a 750 mL bottle. 

Details: 63.35% ABV. Aged for 6 years, 4 months, 12 days.

Nose: Oaky notes of leather and vanilla. Spicy notes of allspice and cinnamon. Sweet notes of brown sugar and caramel.

Mouth: Brown sugar and baking spices.

Finish: Nice and long with a good “bloom” of heat and flavor after swallowing. Lingering notes of of green apple and baking spices.

Thoughts: This is a great whiskey. Compared to other bourbons in it’s price range, this is still one of the best “regularly available” bourbons on the market. I think this bottle finally laid the last remnants of that hidden grudge to rest. I’ll be adding Booker’s back into the rotation of barrel-proof bourbons I buy.

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BourbonGuy.com accepts no advertising. It is solely supported by the sale of the hand-made products I sell at the BourbonGuy Gifts Etsy store. If you'd like to support BourbonGuy.com, please visit BourbonGuyGifts.com. Thanks!