Wheaters part 4: The Great Wheater Night

Wheater Night

It was ambitious

We might have gone a bit overboard with this one. My friend Greg and I finally got to have a whiskey night after a long interval. Reviews of the Pappy Van Winkle 15, Jefferson's Presidential Reserve 18, Vintage 17, William Larue Weller, Old Weller Antique and Old Rip Van Winkle will follow.

The point of this evening was to take a broad survey of high-end wheaterdom and  compare in a few cases  to more standard offerings to get a feel for the actual value added by the more expensive and harder to get bottles. We also tried or hand at a couple vattings (not so insane when you remember that PVW and lot B have often been vattings of different bourbons). It's really great to be able to try everything together to allow comparisons and really bring perspective. Here are our most notable thoughts:

Buffalo Trace

• Pappy 15 is an awesome, just incredible, perfect wheated bourbon. It roundly beat everything else here and we both agree we like it better than the Pappy 20 (which we did not open last night). I don't have a clear enough memory of the Pappy 23 from my one tasting, but I think I would always pick 3 15's over a 23. At $100 this is not inexpensive but may be the best bourbon currently made and certainly ranks among the best $100 whiskeys of any kind. The only thing I can say to temper this is that I'm not sure that the best wheater really beats the best straight ryes, but that is personal preference.

• Buffalo Trace makes too many wheaters. We think they should consider discontinuing Lot B. The best bottles of Weller 12 are as good, and less stellar examples are still well worth the $25. Lot B is too expensive and too hard to find. If we got rid of it, Weller 12 could be more available. 

• Along similar lines, we think that Old Weller Antique should go. Screaming OWA fans hear me out: OWA is a very nice value bourbon, but if we had more access to either Weller 12, or ORVW 10/107 (which these OWA barrels grow up to be) I think we could live without the OWA. We need to stop tapping these barrels in the flower of their youth and wait until they are the far superior 10-12 year-old versions. I guess we could keep the WSR as an incredible value alternative to Maker's.

• WLW can also go: obviously a well-selected barrel-proof Weller 12, we could stop fooling around with this and make more W12 available. While we are at it, why not put the Weller 12 in a nicer bottle at 100 proof, charge a touch more and split the difference.

• Because of all of the above, our dream lineup BT wheaters would be a pared-down roster of WSR, ORVW 10/107, Weller 12/100 and PVW15. This would maximize all that is good and right about BT wheaters while perhaps helping availability. The PVW 20 and 23 should obviously live on as limited editions.

Other Wheaters

• The Vintage 17 wheater was really, really nice. A KBD-bottled wheater made at Bernheim with KBD's usual flair for creative names. Too bad this stuff is no longer made.

• The JPS18 was not as good as the JPS17. The extra year seems to have done it no favors.

Vatting

• The 50:50 blend of OWA and W12 made popular on Straight Bourbon remains a great thing, though the nose is better than the palate. 

• A step-up version of the above with ORVW and W12 was incredible, and was the inspiration for our plea for W12/100.

DIY Hirsch 16- The best nose of any American Whiskey we have ever encountered!

• The best, and perhaps most heretical vatting was one I conceived during my only experience with Hirsch 16. I enjoyed it after some JPS 18 and at the time thought that they were similar but that the H16 brought much more enjoyable rye complexity to the midpalate as well as more of the acetone notes I enjoy in PVW and George T. Stagg. So we did the obvious: added GTS drop by drop to JPS18 until the grassiness faded from the midpalate and was replaced by all of the intense rye-bourbon notes we love about the Stagg. The nose on this stuff was staggering. I'm not going to compare it to the Hirsch, but I would encourage any of you whiskey nerd with both of these open to try it. As Greg put it, "Stagg might be the white truffle of the bourbon world - an expensive, exotic, wonderful flavoring ingredient that is best not consumed by itself."

Michter's 10 year-old Single Barrel Rye

The undiscussed rye from Ryeday (see previous post) is perhaps the most enigmatic and opaque. Michter's is the name of a closed distillery that operated (first as Bomberger’s) near Shaefferstown, Pennsylvania until it closed in 1989 after filing for bankruptcy. This distillery was well regarded in the northeast as a producer of a sour-mash Jack Daniel’s alternative and is now most famous for having produced the excellent Hirsch 16, possibly the best bourbon I have ever tried, recently made even more famous in Chuck Cowdery's book, The Best Bourbon You’ll Never Taste. (Contrary to the title, I got lucky at a restaurant in Princeton). As you will note, this last was bottled by Hirsch, not Michters, and here is where things get even stranger.

The only empties I've ever saved. The Hirsch 16 was made by Michter's, unlike the Michter's 10.

The current "Michter's" is a brand owned by Chatham imports of New York, who do not distill. Their whiskey is either sourced from other distillers or made by them under contract. More complicated still is the fact that Chatham is rumored to have sourced the Michter's 10 year rye whiskey from Kentucky Bourbon Distillers (KBD), who themselves did not distill it, but rather souced it from someone else. This may have been the Cream of Kentucky rye that also goes into Saz 18, or it may have been more of the Medley rye that goes into the Hirsch 13,21,22 etc. 

The Michter's 10, in particular, has the warm and rounded spice notes of the other, older medley ryes, and shares some of the maple syrup nose in the empty glass, but there is perhaps less up-front oak. There are definite notes of fig jam, apple and rye bread on the nose.  There is, in the mid palate, a very similar profile to the VWFRR (I actually mixed up my glasses at one point the other night). If there is a difference in the palate, there again may be slightly less wood, a touch more bitterness and a touch of peanut that led my friend to suggest there could be Beam product present (I'm not so sure about the latter, but would be very happy indeed to learn of an as-yet unintroduced aged beam rye). Similar to the Sazerac, there is a candied quality and lighter body overall when compared to the Medley ryes.  The finish also shares more with the younger-tasting Sazerac, with a candied sweetness and minty sensation on a moderate length finish, compared to the 15 minutes of maple syrup after a sip of Hirsch 22.

Takeout bottles are important when visiting friends with good whiskey

Whatever the provenance, this rye is certainly of a class and character with the Van Winkle, Black Maple Hill and Hirsch ryes. Really, if presented the option I would buy whatever can be found most cheaply. The only older rye that is head and shoulders above this is the Hirsch 13. The Hirsch 22 and BMH23 are by far the smoothest and almost liqueur-like, though whether that is a good thing may be a matter of taste.

This guy is usually about the same price at this point as the VWFRR, but (in most markets) easier to find. Many may object to the opacity of non-distiller producers like "Michter's," but once in the glass I find no problem with this stuff at all. I already have more bourbon and rye in the man-room than my wife finds healthy or sane, but I think I will be adding at least one more of these. 

And to continue the OCD, the current, update on our thoughts about the Rye Venn Diagram:

Ryeday

Having finally declared the Great Dusty Hunt to be dead, we returned to my friend's house/whiskey storage facility.  We decided to try my Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye 13 against his 2012 release Sazerac 18. He also had some Hirsch 22 open. Michter's 10 year old single barrel rye was feeling left out, so we invited him, too:

These guys are all a bit confusing. None of them actually tells us straightforwardly where they were made or by whom. The Michter's is probably 18 years old, despite the 10yo label, and the VWFRR is likely about the same. After some tasting and lots of  obsessing on StraightBourbon (who I'd love to join, but am having some trouble with the ISP email only requirement...) as well as Bourbon Enthusiast (another great resource),  I have come up with the following provisional theory of provenance (please feel free to correct or discuss further!):

I've actually no idea about the Michter's

We did not take notes, of course, and I had to fly to Miami the next morning, but a few impressions predominated. First, the Hirsch 22 is incredibly dangerous. So smooth that a pint glass seems like a fine idea when faced with a bottle until one realizes it's $120. Overall, the nose presented a hint of waxed wood furniture (specifically church pew) along with (perhaps unsurprisingly) rye bread. We agreed that this was as close to overoaked a whiskey as we have had and enjoyed (I find the vintage ryes overoaked), though to be honest it really shows more barrel that anything else. This is only a bad thing if you don't like vanilla, spices and caramel.

The Saz 18, by comparison, seemed very fresh and had far less barrel influence, making it seem  younger. What it lacked in barrel-y smooth goodness it made up for in sweetness, rye spice, mint and focus. The Hirsch could almost have been any extra-old whiskey, but the Saz was unmistakably rye. At half the price of the Hirsch (if you can find it at list price...) this is an incredible whiskey. Had it again at Michael's Genuine in Miami a few days later and found that it even paired well with food. If the Hirsch is a big, slutty delicious California Cab, the Saz is a focused, brightly acidic Burgundy. Would kill a man to try the barrel proof version, but there is apparently so little Saz 18 that we will never see it.

Based on the Venn above, it should be no surprise that the VWFRR was intermediate. This thing is a freaking unicorn. I've found 3 bottles since I started buying whiskey. All the hype of Van Winkle, all the hype of rye, and tiny, tiny production. Labeled as 13 years old, it is, as mentioned, likely far older and is purported (at least for the last few years) to be a vatting of Medley and CoK. Honestly, I was hoping that the VW13 would be as close as possible to the Hirsch 13, which is the finest rye whiskey I have ever tasted. It was close, but I don't think the vatting did it justice. That said, it is probably in my top 3 rye whiskeys. We tried vatting the Saz 18 with the Hirsch 22 (just a small amount) and found the mixture delicious, but not identical to the VWFRR.

As I said, I do not have detailed notes for these, but I think they are all excellent and worth seeking out as, though expensive, they represent the end of a rye era. Whatever the age statements of these ryes, and whatever their actual barrel ages, much of this stuff is actually far older, having been "tanked" in stainless steel vats where they do not age further and from where they are periodically doled out to us. As such, they are essentially Dodos. We shall not see their like again.

Of course there has been much made lately of the rye renaissance, and we are all happy for more rye, but it will be 2015 at earliest before we see a new 13 year-old rye whiskey. I hope the years to come will bring more and equally good mature ryes, but they will not be the same. These guys are all really expensive, but they are getting scarce and not getting any cheaper. To try a bit of distilling history, I would refer Philadelphia area folks to leave the bottles in stores to me and head over to Southwark (with whom I have no relation), who have far and away the most amazing selection of rye I've seen in  any bar in the country.

Next up: Michter's 10 Single Barrel Rye