Review #46: Four Roses Single Barrel Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 50% abv, Warehouse HE, Barrel 51-5H

I have a plan

My wife thinks, correctly, that I have too many bottles of Scotch open. Fortunately, I've developed a two-step action plan.

1. Finish more bottles of Scotch.
2. Open more bottles of Bourbon.

Step 1 has been going so well that I thought I'd make a start on Step 2.

This is Four Roses Single Barrel. According to the bottle tag, Jim Rutledge has "carefully selected one of the 10 recipes for Four Roses Single Barrel." I believe he has carefully selected OBSV for every single barrel. "B" is the higher rye mashbill (35%) and "V" is the "delicate fruity"yeast. I'm glad to know all this -- I find it a little strange that such things aren't usually disclosed, and even weirder that Scotch producers (more or less) all dump bags of commercial yeast in their wort. (of course, I find it a little weird that this is NAS.)

Nose: buckets of fruit, slightly sour wood, and then a rich creaminess that sits somewhere between vanilla toffee, yoghurt, and creme brulee. The sweet wood aromas are really interesting -- not just vanilla but I'd swear there's birch and maple in there. It's like wood candy.

Palate: lots and lots of black cherries, spiced with cinnamon and sassafras, and the woodiness becomes fairly astringent.

Finish: the wood candy again, and then spicy rye bread lingers for a while.

This is really delicious -- very fun to drink. At the same time, I can see why a blend would be appealing: this is cherry + creamy + wood, about as clearly and finely expressed as possible. I might get tired of it if it were the only whiskey I had opened, but that's not my action plan. As things are, I like it quite a bit.

score: 86