Mulholland American Whiskey

Very smooth. Lemon honey and herb

N: Boozy nose, but it tempers with some air. When you get past that ethanol, there's orchard fruit, cherry, and some cooked vegetable notes. Eventually, the sweet corn starts to come through with some caramel and vanilla, so you know this is a bourb—wait, not labeled as a bourbon, but "American whiskey." Hmmm... There's a shaving soap or shaving cream note that I feel like I've picked up before in MGP juice (which this likely is) and that I tend to like (never had one taste like soap and the smell is pleasant). Later into the pour, vanilla starts to get assertive. P: Quick flash of toffee before moving to cinnamon candy. The cinnamon is more of a savory cinnamon than a spicy, hot cinnamon, but still has a candy sweetness undergirding it. Dark chocolate dust, caramel, vanilla. Little bit of that shaving cream note comes through to the palate (again, it's not soapy and it's perfectly fine there). Finish brings some barrel bitterness and a little more heat. Not much in the way of specific flavors - some oak notes, some of the shaving soap, maybe some cinnamon bark. Medium length. This whiskey claims it was born in Indiana, aged in Kentucky, and finished in Ukiah, California - no idea what kind of finishing that refers to, but they talk about a water source there for their vodka and gin, so I guess that's just where they cut to proof. And then it boldly proclaims itself "The Spirit of L.A." Ukiah is in Mendocino County, about 500 miles north of Los Angeles, so other than the name, and a B-list actor part owner/front man, I'm not sure what ties this dram has to Los Angeles. Mulholland, the name—and, of course, once the man—is/was big in Los Angeles. William Mulholland designed and built the Los Angeles Aqueduct (completed 1913) that brought water from the Eastern Sierra Nevada range into the San Fernando Valley. This conceivably made the exponential growth of the city over the next century possible. But the water rights that supplied the aqueduct generally were not acquired in the most virtuous of ways and parts of the aqueduct were sabotaged by local farmers and ranchers when they began to realize they had been swindled. LA eventually won the "California Water Wars," as they are called, and still holds the water rights to the Owens Valley, which is more or less a desert now, prone to dust storms off its dried lakebed (LA still corrals the river and pumps the groundwater - it's probably in my tap right now). I don't know to what extent Mulholland was involved in the water rights transactions, but he certainly made them possible in the first place. In Chinatown (the movie), the apologetic Hollis Mulwray - an otherwise good-intentioned enabler of John Huston's villainous Noah Cross - is loosely based on Mulholland and some elements of the Water Wars, which at least suggests he was more of an engineer and a wonk than a profiteer. However it all went down, Mulholland is still a known name around here - the infamous and exclusive Mulholland Drive above the Hollywood Hills is (obviously) named for him and so are a handful of other places. His name is distinctly intertwined with Los Angeles. And so I suppose the "Spirit of L.A." must evoke dubiously acquired water rights. I also suppose the name of the "distillery" (I'm not sure they actually distill anything, or ever intend to - their stocks all come from elsewhere right now) is a clumsy attempt to harken to the name that brought water to LA and made the city what it is, and in the same way they want to bring the whiskey/gin/vodka (fire water!) to LA and, well, whatever... you get the point. There are distilleries actually making whiskey in LA right now (a couple). With a different vision and kind of investment, these guys could do it too. But, instead, there's just no authenticity in this brand (which may be the most LA thing about it). The whiskey itself is bottled at 100 proof and has a mash bill of 94% corn, 4% rye, and 2% malted barley. I'm not sure why it's not labeled as a bourbon (and presumably is not actually a bourbon). I can only guess it's an issue with the barrels - perhaps they reused barrels instead of getting the new, charred oak required to meet the definition of bourbon. The whiskey doesn't really taste like it got a much char - there's some oak and vanilla, but it's less than you get from most bourbons - so that's my best guess on the bourbon question. It's clearly very young - didn't spend too much time in whatever barrels it went into - 2 years or less, I would venture. Whatever this is, however, it's actually okay, passable on taste alone. It's a terrible value though - it doesn't even begin to compete with something like an Evan Williams BiB or Wild Turkey 101, both of which are cheaper. But then this is likely young MGP juice, aged in who knows what, so maybe that's your jam at $30. It's not mine. _______ A bunch of regular Distiller reviewers are now chatting in real time. Please join: https://discord.gg/crpksjtkMu. (If the link is expired, post a comment and I can get a new one.)

Spicy corn. Hot proof