Well, well, well…lookie who we have here. Is it bracket time again already?
No, I mean that seriously. I’ve been so caught up with getting all the paperwork for my new dog-sitting business in order that I completely forgot that it was March (and hence bracket season) until last Wednesday when my wife reminded me. In the time since, we chose the theme, bought all the whiskey, seeded the brackets, and, yes, did all the tastings. Oh, and also worked on the previously mentioned paperwork.
Now you might be thinking, “didn’t this used to be called the bottom-shelf brackets? I see some pretty expensive whiskeys up there.” Well, you’d be right about that. After dumping out approximately seven liters of bourbon last year, I felt like I needed to overcorrect in the other direction and instead decided to throw out the price restrictions entirely. Instead, I decided to follow a different theme: Bottled-in-Bond. Now, my local store has a pretty good bourbon section. And unlike Total Wine (where honestly, I spend most of my liquor money), it has a very good selection of Bonded Bourbons (or, in the case of Jack and Dickel, close enough for this little blog). So I bought them all there. And I didn’t even buy all they had, just the least expensive ones. I could have spent $90 for a sourced bourbon or $65 for a 10-year-old Henry McKenna, but I didn’t.
In yet another “burn it all down” moment, I tossed out my usual seeding rules too. This year I went strictly by price. The most expensive price per milliliter was seeded number 1, and the least expensive was seeded number 4 for each division. Here’s how it worked out this year:
George Dickel Bottled in Bond (7.07 cents per mL)
Old Forester 1897 (6.67 cents per mL)
Wolcott Bottled-in-Bond (6.26 cents per mL)
New Riff (5.60 cents per mL)
Jack Daniel's Bonded (5.00 cents per mL)
Old Grand-Dad Bonded (2.93 cents per mL)
Old Tub (2.80 cents per mL)
Evan Williams Bottled in Bond (2.20 cents per mL)
Which gives us the breakdown above. As you can see, there are a lot of new faces this time. Based on the removal of the pricing restrictions, only two entrants have been here before. Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond and Old Grand-Dad Bonded have both competed previously. And they both won.
This one was a lot of fun. Who you got? Any upsets that you see on the horizon? Let us know down in the comments. I’m very excited to share the results with you.
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