whiskey

Looks like Heathrow only stocks cask strength Ardbeg at the moment. Have most of a bottle of the standard Connemara to finish over Christmas which should be fine.

xp i've tried laddie 10 and laddie 22, but not the 16. i'm excited for the stuff they distilled after the distillery reopened to mature - the 10 is fantastic, but i didnt think the 22 was worth the money. not bad, but i was imagining the 10 with 12 more years in the cask, and it ain't that.

my holiday present to myself this year was a bottle of 30 year old talisker. this stuff... dang.

don't mind me i have my revel stoke in a bag over here

my buddy gave me this for xmas/bday, gonna dip into it shortly

http://www.apetogentleman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/640bottle-image-+-glass.png

trying to figure out if that bottle is on some unintentional ed hardy ish

Just when I thought it'd be a whiskeyless Christmas I get a bottle of Four Roses yellow label in my stocking.

my parents friends got me a bottle of old overholt. i think their daughter who is sort of a wealthy manhattanite type just discovered a whiskey i was into five years ago, but i'm not gonna complain.

Great rye bargain, that. Harsh straight, I think, but good in an Old Fashioned.

the john e. fitzgerald larceny is alright but probably not something I'd seek out. Decent for the price range.

It's possible the long-predicted bourbon apocalypse is upon us, however subtly. Or maybe just Sazerac. For the first time, all Weller bourbons are MIA here: no Antique107, no 12 year. Binny's says they're expecting them to return in January, but you never know. Plus there are murmurings that the 12 may either go up in price or even lose its age statement, just like what happened to the Antique a few years back, with Buffalo Trace/Sazerac allocating its older juice to its more valuable lines. Who knows. What did happen, and I'd call this pretty sneaky, is that Very Old Barton BIB 100 did quietly lose its age statement, in a really shady way, too. It used to say "Aged 6 Years" around its white collar. It kept the white collar and kept the 6, but lost the "Aged" and "Years." So now it just has a big "6" on it where it used to be, but the 6 means nothing on its own.

distributor's out of Weller Antique 107 in the DC area too based on a trip to the liquor store last weekend

Yeah, it's on. Weller 12 and Antique have been AWOL for a while, Elmer T. Lee getting hard to find, and I've heard that Eagle Rare 10 and plain Buffalo Trace are getting harder to find, too. Can't say they didn't warn us, but I'll still be pretty miffed if this stuff returns at inflated prices, if they return at all. BT has been pretty on-message about keeping Elmer T. Lee around, but I have my doubts. There's a new variant of ETL on its way, and I've heard rumor that Elmer T. Lee could be reduced to an annual release. I hope not.

so *now* there seems to be no buffalo trace around. I've been trying to pick up a replacement bottle for a few weeks and every place I've visited has been out, and the guy at the store I was at this evening said he can't currently get any in stock.

he did get some eagle rare though, so I picked up that instead

had this on Saturday and it was pretty extraordinary, tasted alongside the Yamazaki 18 and Nikka 21 and it was head and shoulders above (but insanely expensive and impossible to find)
http://oi60.tinypic.com/2u5s7kk.jpg

green spot is now the go-to

green spot is my fav irish by a mile, that stuff is just pure pleasure

xpost Told you re: Buffalo Trace! Anyway, BT, Eagle Rare and a few other things have made their way back to shelves locally. I'm hearing any time for Weller 12 and OWA, with supposedly no price hike. Hearing a bit later for Elmer T. Lee. Though on all these fronts, no one knows until they actually show.

See, now things are just getting cynical. The last Parker's Heritage bottle was an overpriced $80 or $90 for a 10-year old, modest-proofed bourbon, but $20 of that price went straight to ALS research. But now comes the real march of stupidly overpriced limited edition bourbon. There's Diageo's fake dusties brands ("Old Blowhard," et al) of old mystery juice, likely salvaged from the old Bernheim distillery. There's the upcoming hyper-premium re-release of the entire PHC set. There was of course that absolutely ridiculous $3000+ bottle of bourbon with neither an age statement nor distillery info. And now comes the Booker's 25th anniversary bottle, which contains, illogically, 10-year old whiskey and will sell for, what, $100? Something like that? Just getting silly. I concede it was annoying that Heaven Hill discontinued its 18-year old Elijah Craig, which sold for $50, and replaced it with a series of 20-year+ bottles that sell for literally three times as much, but at least you know exactly how old it is and where it came from. These premium non-disclosed bourbons like Jeffersons, or premium younger bourbons like the Bookers ... I say bleh to that.

This is why Pappy, if you can get it, is still something of a bargain. Pappy 15 I've bought for $50-$80 a bottle the past three years. Each year has been more money than the last, but it's a known-quantity good thing. 15-years old, higher proof, consistently high standard. But this other shit going for twice as much for half as much, with next to nothing known about what's inside? Shameful.

how's Stagg Jr? local store emailed that they got some.

Over-priced, kind of harsh, cynically named, not worth any sort of hype or excitement.

;_;

i don't really agree with josh's assessment. if you are in the market for barrel proof bourbon you only have so many options. it's comparably priced to things like booker's (which is a little cheaper, a lot younger, prob not as good on the balance) and four roses sb barrel strength (better but good luck finding it on the reg).

my opinion prob not worth much but it's pretty good--experiment with adding different amounts of water and you'll find the sweet spot.

Sure, almost any whiskey can be made better/different with ice or water.

xpost I dunno about where you are, but pretty much all 8 (right?) of the Four Roses barrel strength blends are available here year 'round for about $55. And they're all better/more interesting than Stagg Jr.

i thought it was good (caveat being there's very little "bad" bourbon coming from the big 7 (wild turkey is on probation)). sometimes you just need that barrel-proof kick and don't want to deplete your stagg/wlw stash.

xp yeah i don't seem them regularly in mass. these days, certainly not all 8, some places will get one at a time.

booker's is one of my faves

Elijah Craig BP is something special, especially for the price, but it disappears pretty quickly. In fact, not sure I've ever seen it in the wild! I got my bottles at Heaven Hill a while back.

a couple very knowledgeable friends got a taster of Old Blowhard, were pretty cynical going in but can't stop raving about it.

http://www.masterofmalt.com/blog/Images/Irish_Whiskey/George-Roe.jpg

It's getting harder and harder to find rare stuff lingering on the shelf, but I came across a bottle of Angel's Envy Cask Strength today. The same store had a couple of bottles of the Booker's 25th Anniversary, but as much hype as that's been getting I haven't come across any actual reviews, and it mostly seems a matter of marketing. Any of you heard anything? Any reason to grab this, beyond scarcity?

it's 3-5 years older than regular booker's?

That's the only dif, right? That and being priced twice as much as regular Booker's.

it would appear to be the only difference

the barrels are the last ones chosen by the actual Booker

not sure how nostalgia tastes

Allegedly. They say they *could* be among the last barrels he chose. Very cagey for the people in charge.

honestly who even cares

Good point! I should take it to the "whiskey" thread.

you should take it to the thread devoted to parsing beam inc.'s marketing materials

Ha, the funniest thing I read about the bottle is someone suggesting you just buy a regular bottle of Booker's then drink it while watching the ridiculous youtube EPK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qvQnoNRPCA

Years ago, my wife, for work, had to go to an event down at the Noe family estate. I could have sworn she told me Booker Noe had a walking stick made out of an elephant penis.

Just about every detail of that story has blurred to the point where anything beyond "wife" might be wrong, but I'd prefer to think it's all true.

hah i totally believe that

Amazingly I was pretty correct: it was Booker Noe, it was the year 2000, and he did walk around with a cane. Whether it was a cane made from an elephant penis, or that he just owned a cane made from an elephant penis, I'd like to think that if anyone owned or used a cane made from an elephant penis, it was the patriarch master distiller of Jim Beam.

BTW, speaking of marketing, the disaster in the making that is Miller Fortune is pretty fascinating. Pretty much every piece written about its introduction basically rewrote the press release, which circulated all the bullshit: it tastes like bourbon, it's a really high ABV, it's meant to be had in a rocks glass, etc. Not one mentioned the actually taste, because not one actually tasted it, but of course, Miller did nothing to dispel the rumors/derail the hype train. And now it has arrived, and people say it tastes like any other shitty golden lager malt liquor, go figure.

idk who greenlighted miller fortune but my god they should never be let near the industry again

Bottle of Dickel 14 for my birthday, didn't even know they made one that old.

Bought some Suntory kakubin today

http://i.imgur.com/Ok1X7BD.jpg

Surprisingly good and not too mild/clean like the Yamazaki and Nikka single malts I've had in the past

Anybody try that Old Blowhard or Barter house? I've seen it around, but I lack of the gumption to pull the trigger.

OK, following up on my own post, I must admit I've been heartened by the skeptical response. Bottles of the aforementioned were released in Chicago or the area weeks ago, and they seem to be hanging around. Meanwhile, news is coming out that the so-called "limited" run of Barterhouse and Old Blowhard is somewhere around a mere (hah) 39,000 bottles or so of each, which just adds to the layers of bullshit. The middle part of this Whiskycast episode interviews a Diageo guy and repeatedly and politely calls him out on the company's dishonesty, not least the repeated claim that this is somehow SW bourbon and not Bernheim, which it is:

http://whiskycast.com/episode-466-february-15-2014/

Worth a listen.

Also in calling out in bullshit land is this post on Michter's, which goes on waaaaay too long but at least further illustrates the degree of shadiness at work in this business:

http://thebourbontruth.tumblr.com/post/79568476215/deceit-vs-deception-the-heroes-and-hobos-of-whiskey

The level of scorched earth pulling back of the curtain is high enough that the other blogger he calls out in the rant updated his original post to basically give this guy an OTM. The stuff about Michter's shoddy photoshopping skills alone I think is hilarious.