The Angel’s Envy Cask Strength 2013 Limited Edition Bourbon

Tasting notes:
The Angel’s Envy Cask Strength nose opens with prunes macerated in Madeira. (No, we are not influenced by random phrases we read on labels like, “finished in Port.” We are journalists, dammit, journalists with integrity.) It’s like a defunded scientist who created a photon bomb that’s nothing more and nothing less than the world’s brightest sinus fireworks display. It’s a dry, herby iced tea, made by people who both pronounce it and spell it “ice tea.” It’s kayaking down the Grand Canyon after a 50-day rain storm on a boat made from whittled toothpicks (maple), Zamboni bristles, chicken wire, and a mother’s love for serving peas. That is to say, juniper and wet limestone, worn-away nylon, spunk, and blissful irrationality. It’s like a nordic woman in love with Barbara Streisand who undergoes rhinoplasty to triple the size of her nose.
     The mouth, like Siddhartha’s love’s, is like a fresh-cut fig (filled with essence of cherry nectar, nitroglycerine, and the “Can do!” ethos of the Fighting Seabees). That is to say, it’s as sweet as can be, but like Miles Davis, it ain’t gonna take shit off no one. It’s the morning dew on a just ripened cherry that is girding itself to beat back an attack from an uncoordinated, but shimmering, squadron of hummingbirds and sapsuckers. It’s dried pomegranate pips run through a Vic Firth peppermill.  It’s the Old Faithful geyser eruption of Pixie Stix filled with powdered lighter fluid and PCP! It’s Satan’s cough syrup guzzled to rough up his throat so he can howl with the damned! It’s a Bourbon bursting at light speed into the 23rd century, ripping into a barn after the doors closed and the cows came home! Hot damn, I hear the angels singing! 
     The finish is long and drying, a pair of Vick’s® lozenges shellacked and used as sock puppet monkey eyes. It’s a post-Kyoto protocols steel mill running on biomass, rabbit pellets, manure, a porcine waste lagoon, and the earnest idealism of a 17-year old Green Party candidate running for student council. It’s Bob Baffert’s stables, filled with [redacted], [redacted again], and lots of latex gloves. It’s like a big fat cherry sitting there, glowing like the sun, beating down on Tongans and Samoans playing a deadly serious match of beach volleyball, which is to say, intense, hilarious, and possibly freighted with mythic connotations that I cannot fathom.

Rating: