Tag: Single Barrel

Four Roses Single Barrel Limited Edition 2011

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Maker: Four Roses, Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, USA (Kirin)

Age: 12 y/o

Recipe: OBSQ

Warehouse/Barrel: QN/17-34

Proof: 118.6 (59.3% ABV)

Appearance: auburn with long, clingy legs.

Nose: Like distilled jerk sauce. A lovely balance of spice, heat, and fruity sweetness.

On the palate (with water): The fruit really comes to the fore. Less jerk and more Pickapeppa® now. Wild Blackberry, raspberry, pomegranate juice, sweet red currant. All this with some caramel and a tiny hint of oak, but it’s not missed. Like a baroque concerto grosso. No one element dominates, but each takes its own turn on the tongue, resulting in a sublime balance of disparate elements.

I tasted a 9 y/o Party Source bottling of OBSQ for comparison’s sake. The extra three years in the bottle make a pretty big difference. All the elements are there in the younger bourbon, but the hot spice overwhelms the fruit. More like a Buffalo Wing sauce or a romantic solo concerto.

Finish: Hot, then tannic and slightly sweet. This is by far the oakiest part of the whole experience. But even here the sweetness and fruit provide a refreshing counterpoint to the wood.

Parting Words: Not much else can be said about this amazing whiskey. I loved the 2009 edition but like the younger OBSQ, it was more solo than grosso. The sweet cotton candy and bubblegum flavors overran the other elements. The 2010 was the 100th Anniversary (of the distillery building) edition. It was 17 years old, and was too woody and dry for my taste. The 2011 is on par with the first two releases in the series (2007’s 40th anniversary and 2008’s 120th anniversary). It’s expensive for a bourbon (>$70 for per bottle) but it is worth much more than that. Coming from a cheap bastard like me, that’s high praise. It goes without saying, but this bourbon is one of the best I’ve ever had and is very highly recommended.

Four Roses Single Barrel Barrel Strength Head to Head: What a difference a yeast makes!

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1)     OBSK (Binny’s, barreled 4/27/99)

2)     OBSF (Binny’s, barreled 7/11/02)

Maker: Four Roses, Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, USA (Kirin)

Age: NAS (around 9 y/o)

Proof

1)     121.2 (60.6% ABV)

2)     124.2 (62.1% ABV)

Appearance

1)     Reddish copper

2)     Auburn, with a little char in the bottom.

Nose (with water added)

1)     Caramel, spice, jalapeno

2)     Peppermint candy

On the palate (with water added)

1)     Full-bodied. Caramel, a little clove and peppercorn mélange, then burn.

2)     Even fuller bodied. Big herbal hit of mint on initial entry. Then some oak that gets more prominent as the whiskey lingers in the mouth. Bourbon lovers will know what I mean when I saw that at times I wondered if this wasn’t a Heaven Hill product rather than a Four Roses.

Finish

1)     Burn, and a little bit of wood. This hangs around for a long time and as it does, it transforms itself into cotton candy and a little tingle that lingers on the lips like the kiss of a long-distance lover.

2)     In the finish, the mint starts to become unpleasant. It feels like I just got done brushing my teeth. Not that it’s a bad feeling, just way too much mint. It doesn’t linger long though. Much shorter finish than the OBSK.

Parting Words

Yeast is something that doesn’t get a lot of discussion in the world of whiskey. Until recently there wasn’t much opportunity to do a head to head comparison. But over the past few years Fours released all 10 of their individual bourbons (2 mashbills, 5 yeasts) as single barrel barrel strength selections at around nine years old to big retailers like Binny’s in Chicago, Party Source and Cork & Bottle in the Cincinnati area, and Julio’s in Massachusetts. For a breakdown of the 10 recipes and the products that use them, click on friend-of-the-blog Oscar’s post here: http://www.straightbourbon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=256627&postcount=63

In addition to being really tasty, these releases offered a chance to deconstruct Four Roses and conduct amateur experiments (like this one) on the impact of mash bills and yeast strains on the taste of the finished product. As you can see above, it makes a big difference.

Viewed simply as individual whiskeys, I’d have to give the edge to OBSK but the OBSF is tasty too, especially when vatted with other whiskeys, like Four Roses Small batch or another single barrel barrel strength recipe. Both are recommended, the OBSK highly.

Blanton’s (Kahn’s Select)

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Maker: Buffalo Trace, Frankfort, Kentucky (brand is owned by Age International, a division of Takara Shuzo Ltd)

Barrel: 86,Rick 7, Warehouse H (Kahn’s select barrel #3).

Age:  NAS. Dumped 2/23/09.

Proof: 93 (46.5% ABV)

Appearance: Dark copper. Long, thick legs, like Khloe Kardashian.

Nose: Alcohol, oak, leather, delicately sweet caramel, a bit of corn syrup.

On the palate: medium bodied, rich caramel, wood, burn, leather

Finish: Burn, cocoa power, burn, wood, burn leather, burn.

Parting words: Along with rickhouse and something else I won’t mention here, leather is one of my favorite smells. For my 17th birthday, I asked for and received a black leather jacket I wore almost every day for the next three years. That said, I rarely taste leather in whiskey. This was the first bottle I ever got leather out of. It bears a family resemblance to Elmer T. Lee, Rock Hill Farms, and Ancient Age. The tannins that come out as black tea in AA are the leather here. Blanton’s is not a bourbon I talk or think a lot about, but I can’t think of any other bourbon that better represents Buffalo Trace’s #2 mashbill than this. It has all the earthiness, sweetness, and balance that epitomize Buffalo Trace’s Single Barrel offerings. Definitely recommended.

Now Drinking

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Four Roses Single Barrel Barrel Strength KSBW

Age: NAS, ca. 9 y/o

Proof: 112.8 (56.4% ABV)

Recipe: OBSO (For a breakdown of the 10 recipes, click here)

Barrel: GE 553C (bottle 1/172)

This whiskey is not available at your friendly neighborhood grab & go.  This is what is called a “private bottling”.  Where the law permits, certain liquor stores, clubs or even individuals will buy an entire barrel of whiskey (or brandy, rum, tequila, etc) and have it bottled for them by the producer.  The producer will usually pour samples of the contents of a few different barrels, then the purchasers will try them and decide which barrel(s) to purchase.  Binny’s Beverage Depot in Chicago is well known for its private bottlings of bourbon, rye and Scotch, for instance.  The Bourbon Society of Louisville, KY is also known for its private bottlings for members.  Two friends of mine even got together and bought a barrel of Four Roses single barrel that is very well regarded and very tasty.  I know because I’ve had some.

Not all distilleries do private bottlings though.  Four Roses, Willet (not really a distiller, but a producer of excellent whiskeys nevertheless) and Buffalo Trace are well known for their private offerings, but Heaven Hill has started doing them with their single barrel whiskeys too, and one will even find a private bottling of Wild Turkey’s Kentucky Spirit on occasion.

At any rate, in 2009, Four Roses decided to release some of their 10 recipes at barrel strengthas private bottlings to select liquor stores across the country.  Binny’s, as usual, got some of the best barrels.  This one, OBSO, is one of the constituent whiskeys in Four Roses Small Batch.

When sipped at barrel strength, it does that magical thing that high proof spirits do.  The moment a drop hits your tongue, it vaporizes.  This trick is amusing the first few times it happens.  After that, you decide you would like to actually taste it, and you decide you don’t want to have heartburn all night.  So you add a splash or two of water.

The whiskey itself is a dark amber, the proverbial copper penny color.  The nose has a lot of caramel, but a sharp edge to it, too, as the barrel char punches through.  Even with a splash of water, it’s still a hot whiskey.  But it’s a mature heat, more Kim Cattrall than Megan Fox.  The caramel is still there and even stronger on the palate.  The char has retreated a bit, but adds depth to the sweetness and keeps this whiskey from becoming one dimensional.  Not the best one of these Binny’s Four Roses bottlings I’ve had, but still worth the price of admission.

Now Drinking

Josh1 Comment

Four Roses Single Barrel Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey (KSBW)

Age: No age statement (NAS), ca. 10 y/o

Proof: 100 (50% ABV)

Maker: Four Roses, Lawrenceburg, KY (Kirin)

Barrel: CS 36-2C

OK, I was actually drinking this last night.

When most whiskeys are made, a number of barrels from various locations and of various ages are mingled together to produce the desired taste profile.  Single Barrel whiskeys only contain whiskey from one barrel.  Barrels in different warehouses or different areas of the same warehouse will age differently and as a result will differently.  So most every barrel, even if made from the same recipe by the same distiller will taste differently.

Four Roses takes it a step further, though.  Partly as a holdover from when the distillery was making blended whiskey and partly as just pure brilliance, Four Roses actually makes 10 different bourbons.  They use two different recipes with five different yeast strains to accomplish this.  OBSV is the code for the recipe used for the Four Roses Single Barrel.  The standard yellow label version uses all ten recipes, at various ages.

The nose is intense, it is 100 proof after all, but it smells like the blossoms on my dwarf lemon tree.  It’s not a citrus smell, it’s somewhere between lilac and Bazooka Joe bubble gum.  The taste is definately sweet, but it quickly fades into a dry spiciness.  Not a lot of wood is to be found in spite of the whiskey being around ten years old.  But it does seem to be playing a backround role that can be hard to disentangle from the rest of the whiskey, sort of like the violas in an orchestra.  If they weren’t there, you’d notice, but they’re hard to pick out on their own.  Just when you think you have, you realize it was actually the second violins afterall.

Four Roses Single Barrel is, aside from any annual releases or special offerings, my favorite bourbon on the planet.  To me it’s like a Mozart symphony.  It is at once beautiful and elegant, even a little whimsical, but still powerful.  You come away wanting more, but not always sure that you want to do it all over again, because you wouldn’t want to cheapen the experience.