The High West Yippee Ki-Yay Rye

Tasting notes:
The High West Yippee Ki-Yay noses of sweet ’n’ spicy grasses and buttered butterscotch, sautéed in butter ’n’ Scotch. Upon the communion of his nose with the glass, John erupted into song (from My Fair Lady), but as to be expected, garbled the words, “The grain on trains malts ungainly in Des Plaines.” Arise, Sir John, you’ve been dubbed ‘Poet Laureate of the Malt Cave, 2016,’ with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto! Sorry, where was I? Bronze knobs from a knotty pinewood dresser laid gently on an entryway rug that was woven from cherry blossoms and alfalfa sprouts. Stephen found also family stickers on the back a minivan; in other words, he is smelling the daemons of his future life in the present. Sorry, where was I?

On the mouth, an intriguing blend of ipecac syrup and burdock root paste inject some welcome bitterness into the expected sweetness of the rye. Going further, that arabesque of ‘bitter’ is like…adding bitters to a drink. No, wait! That sounds silly! Rather, it’s like climbing the chocolate ladder from white to waxy milk to sour milk to Swiss milk to over-50% cacao to climbing Jacob’s ladder to heavenly bitterness. Chocolate without bitterness is simply a rich excuse for sugar-loading; with the bitter, it’s Theobroma, the food of the gods. This is a new twist on rye and rye-drinking. I typically think of rye as something to be slammed down on the bar by a fiery cowboy or mixed into a cocktail by a fiery-eyed but otherwise stoic, long-bearded, artisinally-sophisticated Brooklynite. Here, I’m sensing an evolutionary process that allows the drink to buffet me internally and externally, as if the vicissitudes of chewing leather to soften it allowed me to see it as divine über-Necco wafers (of the gods).

The finish evokes the act of masticating palm fronds for a battlefield poultice in the Civil War’s largely unknown, and heretofore unsung, Battle of the Lesser Antilles. There’s the continuation of the bitterness, which lasts as long as the woes of David Caruso’s post-NYPD Blue movie career. [Stephen: Is he selling reverse mortgages now?]  We also found an unused, raw hemp fishing net, much handled by urban-myth-believing teenagers.

 

Rating:
On the scale of political phenomena that force a re-evaluation of the status quo–
The High West Yippee Ki-Yay Rye is the grassroots movement–There’s grass, there’s roots, and most definitely a profound re-evaluation of the status quo of rye whiskey ensued.*
 
 
 
                                                                      –Bill
 
 
 
   * And yes, dear readers, I naturally considered rating it on the scale of Die Hard movies, or some such, but here at Malt Impostor Central ever do we take the path of greatest resistance.