Quarter Horse Kentucky Bourbon

Tastes like an April Fools' joke: Nose: Pickle brine, ginger, rye, milk chocolate Palate: Ginger, baking spices, Tobacco

Heinous. Serious contender for worst "bourbon" I've ever tasted. Although at one year I'm not sure how they can legally call this bourbon.

Quarter Horse is made using a technology called TerrePure which the distillers claim can recreate years of aging in a matter of hours using ultrasonic waves. No I am not making it up. That's how the technology is described. This Bourbon has been aged for a year and, as far as I can tell, then put on the TerrePure machine to give it additional flavor. Sounds like a cool technology and interesting gimmick but in practice, if the Quarter Horse is anything to go by, this will hardly be the future of bourbon making. Right off the bat it has one of the least inviting smells from a bourbon I have ever experienced. It smells of corn, rye, hay, sandalwood chips and a strange burst of ethanol. The sandalwood chip smell isn't pleasant though. More like a dusty accident than an intended odor. As for the ethanol, it reminds me of the various alcohols I got to experiment with in Organic Chemistry. Not quite the ethanol humans consume. Taste wise this is just really bizarre. It tastes like some other liquid that isn't bourbon doing it's best impression and falling quite short. Best comparison I have is how Stevia kind of replaces the taste of sugar. You can still tell it's not "real" sugar though. Or as if you left a glass of bourbon out on a hot day then came back to it and it tastes flat and lost most of its flavor. This isn't pleasant. There is some flavor of apple tart along with the sweet corn flavor of bourbon so it isn't all completely bad but these positives don't last for very long. They're extremely ephemeral quickly giving way to one of the worst finished I have ever experienced in my life. Medicinal, perversely bitter, acrid coupled unpleasantly with that fake ethanol taste I caught on the nose which overwhelms the finish quite unceremoniously--it tastes synthetic in the worst sense of the word. Worst of all the finish stays around for much, much longer than the actual flavor. I timed it and it stuck with me for 2 minutes. That's a real shame because I really wanted to like this product. I'm open to new technologies when it comes to production methods and it's a cool bottle. I'm not going to lie, I'm half tempted to buy the bottle both because it looks cool and it makes for an interesting conversation piece and point of comparison. But as something to drink, this is borderline undrinkable. I'm not even sure it can be used as a mixer, though maybe with some Coke the worst of the finish can be dealt with. I could finish my glass so it's not getting a rating below 1 which I reserve for stuff I can't finish and outright makes me want to gag. But this is pretty damn close.

Tasted more like a scotch than a whiskey