Michter’s Unblended American Whiskey Batch #L15L925

Tasting notes:
The nose is a remarkable tableau: tiny mountain climbers with tarragon pitons climbing a mashed potato centerpiece adorned with rosemary needles.  All of which is to say, it’s a sweet, buttery nose.  Indeed, it is velvety, with golden embroidered piping of spice and savoriness.  What’s more, gentle undercurrents of vanilla excite my perception, like minnows nibbling my toes.

The mouth races like a narrow brook: light, syrupy, slippery.  There are river stones, moss-side up, that glisten in their wetness.  There is, to my palate, a perfect degree of sweetness, the Goldilockian mean, if you will.  It’s as if alchemists turned up the flavor profile to undecim (which is “eleven” in Latin, the lingua franca of alchemists).  Now, if those same pseudoscientists could make leather from wood, and then turn the wood into a spearmint tobacco chaw, then they would achieve something remarkable.  They would have found a solid state vehicle for delivering the experience whose liquid state I’m enjoying so greatly right now.

The finish recalls the narrow, burbling brook with its bright drinkability and revivifying percolation.  More spearmint notes surface, and they are followed by sage, Redeye gravy, and Tinactin.  The Soviet Union was once described as a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”  But the only mystery here is how this new make, precisely because it is placed inside of bourbon barrels, has to be called something other than bourbon when it comes out again. Surely if the bourbon rule makers had tasted this whiskey, they’d have seen the error in their ways.  I am convinced that this new make begged to go in there, like Br’er Rabbit pleading to be thrown into the briar patch.
 
 
Rating:
On the scale of facts about the young Winston Churchill–
The Michter’s Unblended American Whiskey is the fact that his mother wrote him, at 15, with prescience: “If you would only trace out a plan of action for yourself & carry it out & be determined to do so—I am sure you could accomplish anything you wished.”–The folks at Michter’s clearly have a plan that they are carrying out with determination, and we are all lucky to be able to enjoy the accomplishments.
 
 
 
                                                                          –John
 
 
 
–Our thanks to Michter’s for the sample!