The Redemption High Rye Bourbon

Tasting notes:
The Redemption High Rye Bourbon nose opens emphatically—but stress-free—with the vegetal herbaceousness of rye grain that’s been sifted through a green pepper sieve. (Don’t ask me how the pepper maintains its structural integrity; do I look like a materials engineer?) Underneath those high notes is a magic carpet of sweet, sweet corn. There’s a whole new world waiting to be discovered, a world where the crows from Van Gogh caw over wheat fields, cornfields, and snake pits in the hot sunlight. A world filled with pencil shavings and crushed graphite, dusting spilled Cracker Jack® in the otherwise spruce and tidy one-room schoolhouse. John got also bluestone paver dust that’s been mixed into hominy grits lightly sauced with a jambalaya reduction, because of course he did.

The mouth has a strong kick to it, like an emu determined to outsprint a pony in a race to the peppermint candy cane pole left in the meadow, in place of a Maypole, by a Willy Wonka-esque confectioner. There is also cherry-juice-laced popcorn sprinkled at the base, as if by a benign Queen of the MayCorn granting usufructs, easements, and scatterings of cherry-juice-laced popcorn. And yet, the Queen has a steely spine: she is determined and filled with a bitterness that grew from a marriage of political necessity to Prince HighRye of a neighboring kingdom. Sure, she grew to love him! Sure, the two realms grew in power, influence, and higher standards of living for all their subjects! Nevertheless, she wanted a Prince Ali to whisk her away to even more exotic lands and tour the world!

The finish is long and sinuous, like eels or snakes, wrapped around my uvula like a caduceus, then spiraling down my esophagus, twirling down like my stomach was sipping it from my mouth via a Krazy Straw™. I like to imagine the spirit arrived somewhat dizzy before being metabolized. I found also that my salivary glands were taken hostage, the little elvers squoze them, and it’s not clear what the ransom demands are. I’m unlikely to pay in any case: The High Rye Bourbon doesn’t negotiate at the poker table.

   

Rating:
On the scale of construction tools–

The Redemption High Rye Bourbon is a Tower Crane–They are steely-spined (to say the least), they transform cityscapes, they save lives and back-breaking labor, and without them, there’d be no way to erect modern High Ryes buildings. (The secret rating is, beloved by me, on the scale of puns, the Redemption High Rye Bourbon is corny dad jokes.)

   

   

                                                                                      —Bill

   

   

–Our thanks to Redemption (and Chandni Patel of R\West) for the sample!