Last Night's Tipple

In the early days of Kentucky Bourbon, not everyone who wanted to distill had enough wherewithal to afford a copper pot still. It was common in such circumstances to improvise a pot-like still from a log. That's right. A log. A log was split in half, hollowed out, and joined back together. The top was fitted with a thing that looked like a hollow Hershey's Kiss with a copper pipe running out of it. Another length of copper pipe ran through the hollowed-out portion of the log. The distiller would fill the cavity of the log with his beer, run steam through the copper pipe in the cavity, and collect the alcohol running out of the copper pipe coming out of the Hershey's Kiss on top. This method of distilling was called "running the log," and one of the early distillers who used it was Joseph Washington Dant, who began distilling in Nelson County in 1836. The Dants became one of the first families of Bourbon, with JW's eponymous brand of Bourbon and son Joseph Bernard Dant's Yellowstone Bourbon being two of the best-selling Bourbon brands in their day. Just as you can't turn around today without meeting another Beam in Nelson County, so too do Dants abound, although they have been out of the whiskey business since shortly after Prohibition. The JW Dant brand kicked around a number of different owners and finally settled with Heaven Hill in the 1980s. It's not a prestige brand anymore, and its distribution is limited; but it does have a modest following.

The bottle of JW Dant that I bought was Bottled in Bond. The back label says that it was distilled and bottled at DSP-KY-31. The interesting thing about this is that DSP-KY-31 is the old Heaven Hill Distillery, which burned in October, 1996 and has not been rebuilt. The bottom of the bottle has the digits "06," which suggests that it was bottled in 2006. This means that the whiskey in the bottle is either 10 years old, or Heaven Hill is using old labels. After tasting the whiskey, I think that the latter explanation is more likely. The nose is all char and wood, developing into vanilla with some time in the glass. The palate is grainy and hot. This does not taste like an old whiskey, and I would be absolutely shocked if it was actually distilled in 1996. It's not spectacular, but it is a decent enough whiskey for $15 a fifth.