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Sometimes there’s a blind bottle that you immediately know what it is. That’s the case with the Slacker’s December 18th bottle. It seemed to have a flavor profile that was prolific enough that the whole group came to a pretty overwhelming consensus. Take a look for yourself:
The comments section was full of banter about which year of GTS this would be if it was actually revealed to actually be one. There was also a strong case for it to possibly be EH Taylor Barrel Proof with three participants guessing that was the bottle we were tasting. But with so many people guessing an age range into the double digits, it seemed less likely to be EHTBP and more likely that it was GTS.
So what tasting notes led us to the conclusion that this was GTS? Let’s look at the breakdown.
I know I say this a lot, but there are certain bourbon flavors that always end up being the most common – oak, caramel, vanilla and some sort of spice. These things tend to be influenced by the barrel the whiskey was aging in. But if we look away from those main notes, the ones that really speak to a Buffalo Trace enthusiast are the chocolate, tobacco and cherry. It’s not like other distilleries don’t have these, but highly aged Buffalo Trace mash bill #1 always seems to have them in spades. This is why I think so many people put GTS as their guess for today’s blind.
In my defense (I’m Mike on the guessing board), I was also on board with GTS being today’s blind guess. But because I continuously doubt myself and thought that nobody would enter a GTS into the Advent, I put down a guess from a bourbon that I found to share a lot of similarities to GTS – the 150th Anniversary bottling of Old Forester (Batch 1). I thought it was a dead ringer for GTS the last time I had it, but I should’ve kept with my original guess because the bottle ended up being…
December 18th Reveal
… a 2019 George T. Stagg. Coming in a 116.9 Proof, this was (and has been) the lowest proof a GTS was ever bottled at. For that reason, many BTAC and GTS lovers have shunned it over the years. But I thought that the flavor profile stayed pretty true to the GTS legacy. The scores everyone gave reflected a top-tier bottle as well.
One of the participants correctly submitted a 2019 GTS guess about 30 minutes after the bottle had been revealed. While there is no reason to doubt that he arrived at this conclusion on his own, (the reveal stays hidden unless you click on the replies section in Slack), other groups that are doing this more competitively may want to include a rule that correct bottle guesses that come after the blind is revealed can’t qualify for “Best Guess.” This is the first time I’ve ever seen it happen, so there would have been no way to pre-plan for this sort of thing.
So how did the scores end up? Here’s the breakdown:
An average score of 8.81 puts this firmly in the lead for the best bottle submitted so far in our 2025 Advent Calendar. But can it keep that lead with 2 days to go? We’ll find out soon enough!