Slacker's Advent Reveal - December 1st

This is a new segment I’m adding this year where I document the 2025 Slacker’s Advent Calendar that I’m participating in. This is the group’s 6th year conducting one and my fifth year participating in it. If you didn’t see my previous article on how the group runs the Advent Calendar, I encourage you to read it here.

There were 16 participating members for this year. The challenging part will be to compile all of their notes so that you get the big picture view of what everyone smelled, tasted and thought about the pick. The fun part about doing a blind Advent Calendar is that even though we all have considerable experience tasting and guessing on whiskies, we can be wildly wrong.

December 1st.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me… a blind bottle of whiskey. The first bottle of the Advent perplexed me from the get-go. It’s always a crap shoot with this group of guys about the vintage of the whiskey they submitted. I don’t have the official numbers in front of me, but in previous years it felt like 1/4 to 1/3 of the bottles that are submitted are dusties. Hell, even last year I submitted an Old Forester Bottled-in-Bond from 1988.

That’s why I felt stumped with the impressive amount of oak notes coming from the nose. But I also found some fruit, spices and perfume notes that made me think it could go either way. The palate further confused me as I found what I suspected to be a lot of high-rye notes in the form of cherry cough syrup and baking spices like anise, stale cinnamon and allspice. The spice, in fact, was so high that it led me to question if what I was drinking wasn’t above 130 proof.

The finish became super dry and the sweetness had left the room which prompted me to lower the score on a bottle I felt wasn’t trending much higher than an “8” already. So I lowered my score by a full point to a 7. Frankly, a “7” for a bottle that was at least $250 would be a letdown for anyone, but our group has a certain level of honesty coupled with being thick-skinned to know that we don’t mean it personally against the person who submitted the bottle.

I rambled on in my guess where I talked about how I could see this being one of the Rhetoric releases from Orphan Barrel (the 20 to 25 year old bourbons), but I felt like it had too much proof to be one, so I went with a Buckner’s Single Barrel 13 Year Old Bourbon release that was sourced from Barton. Barton has a habit of losing most of its fruit notes and becoming somewhat one-dimensional and oaky. I also questioned myself because I noted that the excessive oak and chocolate notes made it feel like it was double barreled.

Here’s what the 15 other people in the group guessed:

As a quick aside, the reason there are some blank spots is simply because not everyone gives a guess as to what the whiskey is. I also compiled everyone’s tasting notes to zero in on the most recognizable traits by the group. If you’re on a mobile device and have a hard time to seeing what the words are, try downloading it and opening it in your picture viewer and expanding with your fingers. Desktop users are probably ok. Anyway, I broke them into 6 primary groups. Future reviews may have more. They are:

As you can see, Oak, leather, chocolate, brown sugar, vanilla, spice, “nuts,” orange and cinnamon are some of the most common profile notes found. I highlighted them if at least a quarter of the members found them.

December 1st Reveal

At 8pm PST, Mary posted the reveal on Slack and the group went wild. Nobody was exactly correct, although we did have quite a few Heaven Hill guesses in the chat. Here was the reveal:

Of note, when we submit our bottles to Craig’s wife a month prior to the Advent starting, we must take a picture of the bottle as well. So she has them all saved up to post on the reveal. I don’t know how everyone else does it, but a picture is SO much better than just typing out the word. It also adds an extra layer of believeability because the first thing all of the people do who submitted the wrong answer is use their own coping mechanism to deal with their error. Usually it’s in the form of denial, haha

Once the first day was over, I compiled the score that each member gave to the bottle when they submitted their final guess. Here are the stats:

My score of 7 was the second-lowest of the group while Henry absolutely loved his (a 9.8!). But the average of 8.2 out of 10 seems to put it into perspective that this is still a very good bottle. And as usual, the group will pick on me by posting up a previous review I’ve done so that I’m forced to eat crow, haha. So here’s a link to this bottle when I reviewed it all the way back in 2021.

On to Day 2!