Moderator: Squire
JAORobot wrote:...will wild turkey release another 15 or similar/older product anytime?...
Strayed wrote:JAORobot wrote:...will wild turkey release another 15 or similar/older product anytime?...
Well, let's see... Wild Turkey USED to put out a really nice 12-year-old, about three years ago. Does that tell you something?
As to bourbons that you may never meet again, well yeah -- that's true. But it's also true of just about any bourbon. Especially single-barrel bourbons. There's about 240 bottles (more or less) of whiskey in a 55-gallon barrel. The angels take their share, but that's mostly water and the distillery replaces more than that amount when they reduce it to 100 proof or whatever. Two hundred forty is not a whole lot of bottles -- think of how rare a piece of art pottery or a print would be if it were, say, number "177 of 240". That's pretty much the idea behind Single Barrel. The next barrel will only taste the same to someone who can't descern the difference. In some cases the difference between bottles from one barrel and the next can be really obvious. And the flavor profiles of bourbon brands change over time. Today's Maker's Mark is completely different from what it was in the seventies. Same with Wild Turkey, although not as dramatically. And those are bourbons still made by the same people. When you get into the J. W. Dants, the Henry McKennas, the Yellowstones, whose familiar names have been passed from one company to the next, it's easy to see that nearly any bourbon you drink today is likely to be a whole different beverage in less time than it would take to deplete the current stocks. Old Crow (up to ten years old or more, and 100-proof) was one of the finest bourbons available (outside of Kentucky, anyway) as recently as twenty years ago. Today, as an 80-proof three-year-old in a plastic bottle, it may well be one of the worst.
The point is, treat ANY bourbon as if that bottle were the last one you'll ever see of that particular whiskey. Because really, it is.
I think "all in all" the differences may be down to different forms of warehousing, perhaps more use of cycling than in the past, perhaps (and this does get back to white dog) more yield being obtained from a given amount of grain, thus changing somewhat the flavor.
2) Higher barrel proof: Brown-Forman spent hundreds of thousands of dollars having the world's leading organic chemistry labratory in Germany do a study that prooved that many of the barrel flavors wanted in a whiskey dissolve better in water than alcohol, thus the lower the barrel proof, the better the flavor from the barrel. In the 1960's the barrel proof went from 110 maximum to 125. This allows for cheaper whiskey because you will get more bottles of 80 proof whiskey out of 40 gallons of 125 barrel proof whiskey than you will out of 40 gallons of 107 barrel proof whiskey (I will let Howie do the math as to how many bottles are in each, 750 ml bottles, Howie). This makes it cheaper to produce with greater profits.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 81 guests