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The moment my lips hit the glass on December 3rd’s Advent blind sample, I knew it was a winner and rated it accordingly. When the bottle was revealed as Mister Sam (Batch 1), I was over the moon. I thought there was no way that bottle could be topped in rating or secondary price. Unfortunately, Mister Sam didn’t cast its spell over all of the Slacker Advent participants and at the time of writing another bottle has taken the #1 spot halfway through – that damn Kentucky Owl Bourbon Batch 9.
It’s rare that we have bottles much over $500 (secondary) in our Advent, but it has happened before and they’re all usually a hit. Mister Sam was valued at $1200, so I was certain we wouldn’t see anything higher.
Obviously I’m bringing this up because today’s bottle value was higher – by a lot! The only bad part is that our group didn’t necessarily give it a score that reflected its (perceived) value. In fact, looking at this chart of guesses, you’re probably stumped what it could be as well…
I think one of the first things that stands out is just how wild the swing of proof guesses was. There were nine participants that thought it was between 86 and 105 proof and six participants that thought it was between 110 and 125 proof. Look back on the previous Advent days and you’ll see how uncommon this is.
The one thing most participants picked up on is the high age of this mystery bottle – everyone’s leaning into double-digit ages with nine of us thinking it was at least 12-years-old. And for the ones that didn’t pick a double-digit age statement, their guesses assumed it’s a dusty (which typically have lots of old barrels blended in anyway).
The guess for which producer it was seems to offer no consensus. There were three guesses for Wild Turkey and three guesses for Heaven Hill (even though two of those were of the Pre-Fire variety). That doesn’t even begin to cover the 7 other separate distiller/producer guesses – so who knows? Maybe the tasting notes will guide us towards a clearer guess…
Disregarding oak, caramel and “spice/baking spice” (which are always common in bourbon), there are some interesting secondary notes at play – namely fruits. An interesting observation I have is “if this bourbon is old – and the plethora of tannic and bitter notes indicate it probably is – then why didn’t the fruit notes get overpowered by the tannic notes?” Does this bourbon contain a blend of ages?
Going back to an earlier comment I made about the large discrepancy in proof guesses, I think that the high amount of spice notes participants found might explain why. Typically if a bourbon is spicy, it’s harder to recognize whether the heat is coming from ethanol (proof) or spice. I pegged the proof at 125 – and was the only one to guess that high – but it was difficult to pin down what the heat was from.
So what we know is that this bourbon is both simultaneously classic in taste but also contains a lot of fruit notes. It’s also very spicy, but maybe it’s just high in proof. The taste profile pegs it as either Heaven Hill or Wild Turkey, but there were only two people who said they found nutty notes (a common theme between both). What is this mysterious, expensive bourbon?!
December 10th Reveal
Holy crap! Craig has pulled another unicorn from his magic hat (in previous years he submitted a Donut, a Master Distiller Selection, a Pewter Top and a Jefferson’s Presidential Select). His generosity has really kept in step with the spirit of the holidays and we’ve always appreciated it.
I’ve always wanted to taste this Russell’s Reserve, but have no friends with an open one (let alone a closed one). At this point, I should say something like “what a treat!” but my score doesn’t really reflect it. The lore this bottle brings says I should have enjoyed it much more than I did.
Maybe if I had known which bottle it was beforehand, I would have rated it higher. And before everyone jumps on that comment and tells me how blind tastings are the only true form to know a whiskey’s worth, I also think there’s something to be said about the old restaurant adage that “the first bite is with the eyes.” I think part of the reason a whiskey can taste so good is when you know it’s a special bottle in the first place. It prepares your senses more than a small amber sample bottle can.
I wasn’t alone in giving a lower score either. Here’s how the rest of the group rated this bottle:
Out of the 15 participants (#16 Blake has been sick for almost a week now), about half of them rated this bottle below an 8. The average score drops it to the second-lowest scored bottle so far in the Advent Calendar! How is that possible?!
I swear some day I’m going to break down the metrics on the average score given by each participant to specific distillers because it feels like some people give higher or lower scores depending on distillery. I truly believe some distillate speaks more to certain palates, but that’s a story for another day!
Before I go, I wanted to give my readers a very short backstory about the significance of this bottle. It was distilled in 1998 by Jimmy Russell (who hadn’t handed over the reins to Eddie just yet) using the old “barrel entry proof” of 107. That part is significant because it would be switched in 2004 and again in 2006. No other defining characteristic was really highlighted as to why they picked this single rick of 23 barrels located in one of the six warehouses on the Camp Nelson campus, other than they were set aside for use in a future special project.
The barrels were found to have a worrying amount of evaporation at the 15-year mark and were dumped into a stainless steel holding tank in 2014. It was eventually bottled as a limited edition release in 2015 and sold for $250 – one of the highest priced WT’s up to that time. The 102.2 proof points it was bottled at was supposedly barrel proof as well.
RR1998 (as the enthusiast community calls it) is widely considered to be the best of the three-part series that used the last of the original barrel entry proof bourbon in a single release (RR2002 and RR2003 were the other ones). I still hope that one day we’ll see a release that contains only barrels filled with the interim “110 barrel entry proof” distillate just to have a point of reference as to what that time period was like. I guess we’ll see!