Last Night's Tipple

The Four Roses Distillery was founded by Paul Jones Jr. outside Lawrenceburg, Kentucky in 1888 and was so named in honor of the bouquet of four roses worn by Jones's wife on the night that she accepted his proposal of marriage. The distillery managed to survive Prohibition by obtaining a license to sell medicinal whiskey, and by the time Seagram bought it in 1943, it produced the top-selling Bourbon in the United States. And then Seagram went and ruined it all. They decided that what Americans needed to drink was blended whiskey, so they took Four Roses Bourbon off the American market and replaced it with Four Roses American Whiskey, which was a blended product very much like the Canadian Whiskies that Seagram is famous for (the most famous being Crown Royal). Four Roses Bourbon was only sold overseas. And so the situation remained, even after Seagram's attempts at diversification ruined the company and the Four Roses Distillery passed to the ownership of Diageo in 2002. Only when Diageo sold it to the Kirin Brewery Company (a Japanese company; Japan is, not coincidentally, Four Roses' biggest market). Kirin decided to discontinue the blended whiskey and offer the Bourbon in the United States again. Alas, distribution has not reached much outside of Kentucky yet, but there is hope.

But there is one commonly-available Bourbon distilled and aged at Four Roses Distillery: Bulleit. Bulleit is a brand owned by Diageo, and it's promoted to be competition to such upscale-but-not-horribly-expensive Bourbon brands as Brown-Forman's Woodford Reserve. The label calls Bulleit "Frontier Whiskey", and the Bulleit website spins a tale about an Augustus Bulleit becoming known in Louisville in the 1830s for his high-quality Bourbon. I don't know; maybe the Augustus Bulleit story is true, although it reads like a bunch of marketing hooey to me. I can say that Bulleit Bourbon is much unlike any whiskey found on the frontier before the Civil War, and that's a good thing. Before the second half of the 19th Century, most American whiskey, particularly that produced on the frontier, had more in common with today's moonshine than with today's Bourbon. It was raw, green, and harsh, either unaged or aged only a short amount of time. It probably would not have been very pleasant to drink. Bulleit Bourbon is aged six years, and as such is pretty mellow stuff. It does have the highest rye content of any Bourbon currently being made, and that rye gives Bulleit the distinctive rye fruitiness and spiciness. The other Bourbon that I've tried that it most resembles is Old Grand-Dad 114 proof, which makes sense because OGD is another high-rye Bourbon. There's also some tobacco on the nose (something that I haven't experienced before) and some bread pudding. If it fails as "frontier whiskey," it succeeds as Bourbon. It's not the greatest Bourbon that I have tasted; but it is distinctive, and it is pretty good. And it does hold out hope for those of us waiting for Four Roses Bourbon to be available in our neck of the woods.