450 North Spirits 7 Year Double Oak Bourbon Review

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Located in Columbus, Indiana (aka “The Athens of the Prairie”) – 450 North Distillery is an offshoot of the popular brewery that shares the same name (450 North Brewery). In the past, distilleries and breweries were typically separate entities. But over the past decade, more craft breweries have begun distilling spirits. This trend isn’t as odd as you’d think, though. People who understand fermentation for making beer are usually able to apply that knowledge to spirit distillation.

450 North Distillery is so new that they don’t have any aged whiskey to release. Knowing that, it should be obvious that the bottle you see in my pictures wasn’t made by them. Instead, it was sourced from MGP. You couldn’t outright buy it either, instead, it was available to those who purchased Elite VIP tickets to the annual 450 North Beer Corn Maze.

What is a Beer Corn Maze? It’s the world’s only beer festival held inside of a giant corn field maze. This idea is pure Indiana genius and something that I attended for the first time this year. The concept is that 100 vendors representing local and out-of-state breweries are spread throughout a giant corn maze for you to wander around. Each year there is a different theme that attendees can dress up for. This year it was “Mardi Gras” which would explain why a majority of pictures has yellow, purple and green colors throughout. There were food vendors and a tent specifically for spirits as well.

Thankfully for me, my neighbor Brad purchased the VIP ticket to get a bottle of this bourbon. The ticket price difference meant that this bottle only cost $75 which isn’t bad for a cask-strength, double oaked 7-year-old bourbon. Details are kind of scarce about anything else on this bourbon (like was it the high-rye or low-rye MGP mash bill?), but a picture on their Instagram page seems to show that the secondary barrel was sourced from Canton Cooperage. It was made with staves that were air-dried for 18 months (which is something that was actually branded on the barrel head) and used a char level #3 with toasted heads. Now you know!

So how was it? Let’s find out. I sampled this neat in a glencairn.

Tasting Notes

Nose: The first few sniffs show similarities between a bourbon and Halloween candy. I find a lot of candy bar scents (nougat and chocolate) and some yogurt covered raisins. You’d be the unpopular house if you gave those out at Halloween. I also find candy corn, vanilla custard and cornbread – all are fairly standard bourbon notes to be honest. The one off-note I discovered is wet oak. I know this thing was double oaked, but to me, the oak isn’t as well-integrated as I’d like. It seems to stand out on its own in a bad way.

Palate: The mouthfeel is thick with a chocolatey undercurrent and lots of spices – cinnamon, clove, ground pepper and anise.  You’d imagine with all that spice, there would be a moderate amount of heat – and you’d be right. There is a somewhat grain-forward profile, something the nose hinted at when I discovered the cornbread scent I mentioned above.  Fruit notes are mostly limited to raisins and cherry cough drops.  The tannins revolve around barrel char, virgin oak and a touch of varnish.

Finish: Lingering heat on the back end still shows the impact of the baking spices I found.  There are a lot of residual chocolate notes that pair well with vanilla and caramel.  Tannins like oak and barrel char remain but are smoothed out with a bit of marshmallow fluff aftertaste.

Score: 6.2/10

450 North’s Double Oak Bourbon is an interesting riff on what will happen when MGP bourbon sees further maturation in a new charred oak barrel.  The result was almost an overload of chocolate (and more tannins) that simultaneously had a grain-forward profile.  That’s not a normal thing to find in an MGP bourbon.  Did 450 North use a barrel of MGP’s 99/1 instead of the high/low rye recipes for this release?  I guess I’ll never know.

While I enjoyed many of the flavors that I found within, I do have to say that I found it to be a little bit unbalanced. The notes seemed to be based almost entirely on the barrel influence. Some of them also seemed to taste a little bit artificial. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom – I still found a nice amount of spice notes as well as custard/marshmallow notes that were enjoyable to sip on. Overall, I may have enjoyed the bourbon more if it wasn’t finished in the second barrel, but I’m glad I got to try it this way.