Old Tub Kentucky Straight Bourbon

Neck pour. White label Beam, but better. Nose of Cracker Jack. Sweet vanilla and oily peanut feel give way to cinnamon and pepper with a short finish. Solid for a weekday drinker.

I love Old Tub, simply love it. That statement might contradict my rating of 3.25, but I’ll stand by both the statement and the rating. I love Old Tub. There’s a question whenever assessing a whisky and giving it a score like this whether you should be rating it based on all whiskies or giving it a score based on the class in which the whisky is punching. Old Tub isn’t a heavyweight. It’s not the Mike Tyson or Floyd Mayweather. It’s not a special cask strength single barrel of Four Roses or Old Forester Birthday Bourbon or Little Book. The class Old Tub finds itself punching in are the bargain bottled in bonds like Old Grandad. And because, in Pennsylvania, Old Tub goes for $16.99 a bottle, really, the only other bottles I’ve tasted that are punching in its weight class would be Evan Williams Bottled in Bond or Rebel 100. And these might be fighting words because I know EW BIB has its fans, but I’ve had the two side-by-side and in this class, Old Tub is Ivan Drago and EW BIB is Apollo Creed (the metaphor, admittedly, isn't perfect, since those two were, in fact, heavyweights, albeit fictional). To put that in context, if I were rating according to class, EW BIB would be a 2.5 and Old Tub a 5. But that’s not how I think about whisky. Or maybe it’s how I think about whisky sometimes. Let me switch gears a moment: as I get older, I drink less whisky less often. I know, I know, but certain facts have to be acknowledged. Unpleasant truths. Whisky does its damage, and if I’m going to indulge in something that does damage, I might as well make it high quality. So while, in my twenties, if I’d known about Evan Williams Bottled in Bond, it would have been my go-to bourbon on the salary I was living on then, nowadays, the budget bourbons (if I'm going to indulge in budget bourbon at all and not hold out for a better higher-priced drink) need to be better than that. And Old Tub is, simply put, better than that. It’s not the most complex drink you’ll ever have, but what it reminds me of is the carnival, the ballpark, what it reminds me of—that Evan Williams Bottled in Bond doesn’t—is summertime. On the nose there’s more oak with Old Tub, sawdust, peanuts, sweetness like cotton candy, funnel cake, and the palate follows suit with some caramel corn, yet coming off as drier and spicier than Evan Williams, more in my wheelhouse. And the finish is nice and spicy and certainly not too hot, but just right like Goldilocks’ third bowl of porridge. I tend to see whisky drinking as a communal experience, and for the reason I save my best bottles to open with friends and family. Old Tub is a settling down for the end of the night to watch a movie pour myself a finger kind of bourbon. I’m not rushing out to share this with anyone else. I’m not all that excited to spread the word, but I can’t imagine you’re ever going to find a better bourbon than this for $17.99. And so, I lift it to my nose before I sip, as the summer fades into autumn and my kids return to school and the hard days come to a close and I smell nostalgia for summers past. I wax poetic, dreaming of the 90s again, of being in my teens and heading out to baseball games. I, of course, wasn’t drinking back then, didn’t even know that whisky existed, but the scent of this brings me back to another time, a time when The Sandlot was my favorite movie, a time when, even when it was incredibly hot outside, we didn’t have air conditioning, so I’d sit on my bed, sweating, looking out the window at a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds passing. And that can’t be all bad, can it? It's sort of my boozy version of Proust's madeleine. Can you see from this why I love Old Tub? (As an amusing side note, I see that Jim Beam Bonded has an expert rating of 90 here while Old Tub has an expert rating of 82. Jim Beam Bonded was also $16.99 last year, and I have a few bottles left—because at $16.99 you stock up, right? In any case, I’ve tasted both of these side-by-side and I have to be honest: if they’re different bourbons, the difference is too subtle for my palate to discern, and I’m too lazy to do any research to see whether the recipes are varied. I'd be curious if anyone knows/could explain whether they're different whiskies or just a rebranding/repackaging of the same whiskey. Of course, I should point out that on this site, the ratings were given by different reviewers, which wouldn't indicate any inherent contradiction if they are the same, and to each their own, right?)

I’m not going to add any “it taste like pop corn and Carmel” comments, it’s smoother than Jim Beam regular, and not too expensive, I enjoyed it with a splash of water and ice.

If you like rancid vanilla beans this is for you. If you want a drinkable bottom shelf bourbon stick with Evan Williams. Don’t try the OGD, that stuff will make you blind