by cowdery » Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:37 pm
The "Cult of Oldness" is really about romanticizing the past, especially when it's an assumption that things must have been better in the good old days.
Another aspect of it is this obsession with old recipes, Jim Beam and Bulleit being prominent in that, but not alone. The reality is that you wouldn't want to drink a whiskey made the way they were made 200 years ago. The way they were made 100 years ago may be another matter. What I have tasted in pre-prohibition and early post-prohibition bourbon that I treasure is much more of that wintergreen taste. Today, if you can find it at all, it's very slight. Maybe that came from the lower distillation proof, maybe it came from the older wood, maybe it came from wilder yeast, maybe it came from a combination of all of those.
We know that process controls were not what they are today. That meant less consistency, which probably was a negative more often than it was a positive, but when it was good it was very very good, and impossible to duplicate except by another lucky chance.
One problem with the "dusty" seekers is that a lot of the whiskey produced in the sixties was really awful. There was a period when the producers were trying to cut costs to increase profits. They took copper out of the stills and eliminated doublers.
I guess just for my own mental health, I tend not to pine for things I can't have. Well, I try not to, anyway. I will say that I'm very happy with the current state of American whiskey. I cannot afford to drink whiskey older than 20 years exclusively but if I could, I wouldn't, but to each his own.
I do have a question for a person who chose to concentrate an American whiskey collection on whisky aged 20 years or more.
Why?