By Richard Thomas Rating: A The revived brand King of Kentucky is the latest ultra-aged entry to enter the lists of the Autumn Release Season, the period when most of the prized annual editions are sent to market. This year, King of Kentucky enters its sixth edition. The modern rendition of King of Kentucky was …
By Randall H. Borkus Rating: A- Beam Suntory’s Hardin’s Creek line of whiskeys, launched just last year, is back with a new trilogy called “The Kentucky Series.” The theme is exploring the impact of very specific buildings and locales inside Kentucky on maturation. All three bourbon whiskeys were laid down with the same mashbill 17 years …
By Andrew Graham Rating: A A joke that whisky nerds often make is that we should all band together and drink more sherry to support the Scotch industrial complex, the joke being that many popular Scotch whiskies spend time in the Sherry butts, which are quite expensive and hard to come by lately. More Sherry …
By Richard Thomas Rating: A- It’s been seven and a half years since Elijah Craig Small Batch went from 12 years old to No Age Statement, informally hovering between 8 and 10 years old. During that time, people like me have pointed to Elijah Craig Barrel Proof as a way to get at what the …
By Richard Thomas Rating: A- For its 16th release of the annual limited edition of Four Roses Small Batch, the Lawrenceburg, Kentucky distillery is also marking its 135th brand anniversary. That’s right: although the distillery dates to 1910 (and is thus a historic site in its own right), the brand goes all the way back …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ The question I find myself asking lately is when will Denver’s Laws Whiskey House hit the limit on their progressively older bonded whiskey releases? Although bottled in bond expressions are now fairly common in the craft whiskey sector, Laws has one-upped the game by often raising the age statement on …
By Richard Thomas Rating: A Benriach Distillery is expanding its lineup of ultra-aged single malts in the United States with “The Forty.” That name is the age statement, so forty years old, but it is more than a forty year old Speyside single malt. The whisky was initially “released” in 2022 as part of an …
By Richard Thomas Rating: A- San Francisco’s Old Potrero is part of a tiny class of distillers that I dubbed “craft whiskey before there was craft whiskey.” I say this because outfits like Old Potrero, St. George and Prichard’s were small distillers, starting out in an era when the whiskey industry as a whole was …
By Richard Thomas Rating: A- The 10 year old, single barrel iteration of Michter’s rye whiskey remains my favorite whiskey in its class (and that class includes W.L. Weller 12 Year Old), one of my favorite ryes and one of my favorite expressions from Michter’s generally. The expression is released semi-annually, which is to say …
By Randall H. Borkus Rating: A- With the end of the first quarter of 2023, WhistlePig Farm brought the market a new whiskey called “The Béhôlden,” their first ultra-aged single malt. WhistlePig have sourced from Glenora Distillery in Nova Scotia. For those who aren’t familiar with them, they were the first distillery to make single …
