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Without spoiling the surprise just yet, a funny thing happened with today’s bottle – it’s a repeat from a few years ago. This has happened from time to time in the Slacker’s Advent Calendar, but the group doesn’t make a big deal when it does. Whether by mistake or done intentionally, submitting the same bottle can be a good way of seeing how consistent our participants are and how much our preferences change over time.
I didn’t keep the same kind of data back in 2023 that I’m recording today, but I can tell you that the bottle from December 4th was rated much lower overall compared to when the group rated it back in 2023. I’ll get to those numbers in a bit. Overall, most members rated it about .3 points lower with two participants rating it significantly lower (almost two full points lower). The crazy part was two participants rated it exactly the same in both years. Talk about consistency!
I don’t think I can go any further in this review without revealing what the bottle is, but first let’s see what everyone’s guesses were:
What we can deduce from this list is that almost everyone caught on to the fact this bottle was low in proof. If you remove my guess (I’m Mike) and Steve’s guess, the other participants zero’ed in on the proof being around 100.
There’s a wide range of age guesses, but if you subtract the fact that the ones who guessed on the low end (which were also guesses for dusty whiskies which tended to carry age statements that belied their actual age), then then the average age guess was around 10 years old.
The most common guess for the Distiller/Producer was Heaven Hill. What kind of notes were people getting to assume it was Heaven Hill? Let’s look at the next graph:
Surprisingly, nothing from the compilation of tasting notes and scents really jumped out as “Heaven Hill” to me. Only two people found a nutty element for the nose and palate. Oak, caramel, vanilla and “spice” are all so common that it shouldn’t outright point to a particular distiller. The “Honey/honeysuckle” note is interesting because that’s not a really common bourbon trait (it’s more of a rye whiskey trait in my experience). Even the fruit tasting notes seemed very sparse for what this mystery bottle actually was. This actually segues nicely into the big reveal.
December 4th Reveal
Once the curtain was pulled back, we found out we had been drinking:
I know I always say that the reveal was a big surprise to most people in the group, but this one was an extra big surprise. Absolutely nobody guessed this was a Wild Turkey product, let alone a Wild Turkey product finished in rum barrels. What shocked me the most was the utter lack of fruit notes that anyone picked up on – including me.
When I reviewed this bottle back in 2023, I was finding fruit galore – including banana. Adam is a trusted member of the group and I’m absolutely sure there was no funny business going on, but this bottle seemed like a dud compared to the one I tasted years ago. Does rum lose its influence after a while? It might appear so.
Going back to something I said at the beginning of this review, the group had a bottle of this submitted back in 2023 and so I added two new columns to the average rating list so you can see how the same people scored it from two years ago compared to today:
You could draw some conclusions from this graph, but I think one of the most obvious is that with the exception of two people, the scores stayed roughly around .3 points of what they scored it previously (plus or minus). That’s pretty consistent ratings for any whiskey two years removed!