Tastes

Picked By: LiqGo Barrel #: 11941 Barreled: 9/26/18 ABV: 59.5% Nose is sugar, cream, perfume, flowers. Brine. Body is sugar, yeast, dough, grains. It’s hot. Tastes way younger than I was expecting. Tea leaves. Finish is grainy, with a mild cinnamon. This tastes truly unfinished and young. The body burns. It feels at times like GIRD in a glass. Truly disappointing. 119 is getting up there, so I tried it on ice. While it definitely did improve the feel of the drink, the flavors are still just not great. It tastes shockingly basic, and overpriced by double or triple the price. I really don’t see a place in my life for this one.

The whole separate ID per barrel number concept for this type if thing is a bit out of control. Hopefully people will joine me to make this the consolidation spot for New Riff Rye store picks! Distilled: Feb 18 Bottled: July 22 Barrel#: 8755 Store Pick: LiqGo! Nose is cucumber, watermelon, dill, salt, lemon. Body is sugar, bubblegum, cherry, tangerine. Finish is baking spices, caramel, anise. Juicy finish. Delicious store pick. You can’t really go wrong with New Riff ryes (barring a price point argument) and this store pick is no different. A noticeable tweak to the standard drink.

To have two different single barrel selections, within one calendar year, picked by the same person, varying THIS much in quality… That’s what they call a “feature”, not a “bug.” It’s what makes this fun. The last single barrel pick I had was genuinely awful. Little-to-no redeeming qualities. Leagues worse than the “standard issue.” This one rivals some of the best red-wine finished bourbons on the market, and in many cases, it’s much cheaper. “2 Year Wheated Bourbon finished in red wine barrels for 9 months.” (RWB #002). Little known fact, when you put more zeros in front of the batch number, it increases the quality of your whiskey by up to 36%. Nose is cherries, syrup, grapes, vanilla. Oranges. Great nose. Body is almonds, more cherries. Grape juice. Bit of sugar. Finish burns… hits deep in the chest. The juiciness is there. Very dry. Brine. Salt. I feel this finish more than I taste it, but if I had to pick a flavor I’d say more cherry here. This is a great red wine finish. It’s hot, and it’s a bit too hard hitting on the backend. But it’s encouraging to me that they were able to make something this good. It’s every bit as good as Jefferson’s Pritchard’s Hill, and I hope to see more finished bourbons from HT in the future!

Every now and then you have to take a whiskey from a distillery you love and drag it through the mud. Happy freakin Monday. The nose on this is astringent with a hint of oak, lemon, and paper. It’s hard to pick out anything here. Body is cedar chips. Spearmint maybe? Finish is comically spicy. The burn lingers similar to how a heavily peated scotch does. Not really any flavors to note though. My saliva just hurts. This is heartburn and disappointment in a glass. I simply cant find a way to enjoy it. Maybe as a mouthwash? It’s one of the least pleasant whiskies I’ve had in some time. Techincally consumable, but less enjoyable than a handful of $10 bottom shelfers. Not worth a buy, but also not representative of the other Castle and Key products I’ve had to date.

Nose is oak, lemon. Vinegar. Pear. Bit of pickle. Perfume. Body is brine. Salt. The pear kicks back in. Floral notes as well. Finish is cream. Baking spices. Pear carries though. Baking powder. This is a harsh rye. Not one of my favorites in the rye category, not one of my favorites in the origins lineup. It’s fine, but unlike the bourbons, I think this is not good enough to be worth the $60 price tag.

Nose is cedar, mustiness, yogurt covered animal crackers. Salt. Body is basic bourbon done well. Caramel, leather, vanilla, sugar. There’s some grape in there too. Finish is baking spices, black pepper. Hint of marshmallow. I like this more than black label origins, but it’s for subjective flavor profile reasons. They’re both solid products, and on both they got the pricing right. If I were going to keep one Bardstown product in stock, it would be this one. Leaps and bounds better than the fusions I’ve tried, half the price of the premium products. Well done BBC. The first company ever to use that initialism, I believe. Up next: origins green.

Nose is sugar, walnuts. Dust. Body is walnuts, maple syrup, sugar, raisin. Finish is mint, caramel. Waffles. More walnuts. There’s an urge to compare this to the white label origins that hit the shelves around the same time, and I’d discourage that. They are completely different beasts. This one is the archetype for a nutty bourbon and I think it’s well-made. And unlike so many of the Bardstown releases… I think they got the price point right here. Next up, I unironically compare this to the white label and the rye…

Batch 124: Nose is lemon zest. Potpourri. Melon. Body is lavender, watermelon, melon. Brine. Finish is chocolate. Milky. Black pepper. Bit of orange. I could see cherry. Comparing this to my last: Batch 113. Nose keeps the lemon zest, but completely substitutes more traditional, nutty bourbon notes for less frequent, floral notes. A similar thing occurs on the body, but melon and brine carry through. Finish is very similar. That floral bit is a weaker blend in this drink when compared to nutty notes. Thus, cross-batch consistent notes to date: Lemon zest, melon, brine, chocolate, cherry.

Batch 113. Turns out that little number matters, more on that later. Nose is caramel, oats, dust, honeysuckle. Lemon zest. Body is lemon, maple syrup. Honeydew melon. Brine. Tea leaves. Oat milk. Super creamy mouth feel. Finish is chocolate, milk. Very faint cherry. I like this a lot. In fact, a while back this bottle impressed me enough to launch a Blackened collecting spree, which I’m finally getting to drinking through now. In doing so, I wanted to be able to say that for Blackened, the batch number doesn’t matter. Bad news y’all: it really does, at least at this stage in their business model. I’m trying batch 113 back to back with batch 124, and there is a distinct difference. These two batches are as distinct as two different single barrel store picks. On the bright side, if you had a bad experience, there’s always a chance you could find a better batch later. On the flip: you could recommend this to a friend and have them scratching their head in disappointment. Batch 124 isn’t bad, but for me it’s a solid star lower. My approach to Blackened going forward: I will likely always have a bottle tucked away somewhere. It deserves that. I will not continue collecting them. Blackened doesn’t deserve that yet. And I’m not convinced they deserve to sell anything that costs more that $50, but I will wait to try the Blackened/Willett collab before I say that definitively.

I wanted to try something new, and I have never heard of this distillery nor this whiskey. Much thanks to @ContemplativeFox for the share! Nose is rad. In some ways it smells young: I’m getting sawdust and a mild acetone. But the good stuff is more powerful: I get unwashed strawberries, pine, honey, tangerine. Body is thankfully not young in taste. Fresh flowers, strawberry, grain, and a transition into jalapeño on the end. Finish keeps that jalapeño, and not too much else. Potpourri. Mint. In some ways this tastes like more like a scotch than the ryes I’m used to. It’s pretty soft in terms of flavor intensity, and the bite is very negligible. There’s a pervasive vegetal nature to it, and it gives it an earthly quality from start to finish. When it mixes with sweetness, I get unwashed strawberries. When it mixes with spices, I get jalapeño. Even the mint note is more of a mint herb than a mint candy flavor. It’s fascinating… but I would label this as a rye for single malt drinkers more than a rye for bourbon/rye drinkers. I mean than in both the positive and negative case. Most ryes I’ve had don’t offer this range of notes or even these kinds of notes. But it’s also way softer and lacks the flavor punch I would expect from a rye whiskey.