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If there’s one thing that’s extra hard to do with a blind Advent Calendar, it’s identifying a product from a Non-Distiller Producer (NDP). Some NDP’s stick to one whiskey source which doesn’t make things that bad, but when a producer blends multiple liquid streams together, it becomes something almost unrecognizable. That’s the whole point, though. Why bottle something that a consumer can just buy from the original producer for much less money?
Obviously the bottle for today’s Advent reveal comes from an NDP, otherwise I wouldn’t have said that whole part up above. None of us knew that coming into it, but sometimes the guesses a group makes are so varied that you know something is up. Let’s take a look at everyone’s guesses to see what I mean:
There’s a good split between Heaven Hill (7), Wild Turkey (4) and Buffalo Trace (3) guesses. As for the one Jim Beam guess, I’ve always thought it tastes pretty similar to both WT and HH, so you can see a theme building here. As for the other stats of age and proof, we can see the group is pretty solidly landing in the double digit age statements and a proof that’s likely above 110 and more than likely above 120. So what kinds of tasting notes did they find and will those get us any closer?
Discounting the standard caramel, oak , spice and vanilla notes, we can see that “nutty” notes were detected by a sizeable amount of participants. That would seem to indicate HH, WT or Beam. Nobody seemed to think this was a dusty, but two other tannic notes seemed to get a lot of hits – chocolate and leather. This probably was the reason why a dry/bitter note was also found often. What we can deduce from this is either it spent a long time in a barrel or had been double-barreled at some point (chocolate sometimes signals that).
One interesting trend that might not stand out immediately is the large amount of Floral/Herbal notes for this bottle. I know that you’re not seeing a lot of votes for any particular note (except Floral was mildly high), but for a bottle that almost everyone universally agreed was a bourbon, having this many floral/herbal/botanical notes is interesting. Even more so once you find out what that bottle is. Speaking of which…
December 8th Reveal
So which camp was going to get it right? Everyone was eagerly expecting Craig’s wife to reveal to us a Russell’s Reserve Vintage or a Heaven Hill Heritage Collection/PHC bottle, but as usual, our expectations were crushed by…
Kentucky Owl Bourbon Batch 9. Coming in at 127.6 Proof, here’s what the press release had to say about it’s components and age:
“This release is made with four different distillates from four different mash bills, including a 15-year old, two different lots of 14-year old, a 12-year old, a seven-year old and a six-year old distillate. “
A quick backstory of Kentucky Owl is that Dixon Dedman was notorious for re-barreling his bourbon into new charred oak barrels or mixing and matching liquid into barrels of other bourbon. So maybe a Jim Beam barrel was dumped into a wet Wild Turkey barrel or maybe a Barton barrel was dumped into a Heaven Hill barrel. We’ll probably never know.
For a bottle that’s relatively affordable on the secondary market, this one surprised and delighted a lot of guys in the group. RIP Kentucky Owl, this was during the twilight years of Dixon’s time at the brand and it’ll never be the same again.
