Last Night's Tipple

I had Barton's 1792 Ridgemont Reserve Bourbon again last night, and my impressions were much the same as when I had it back in May. If anything, I liked it better: it's thick and dark and very flavorful, and it's an excellent buy for $25 a fifth. I have read a number of reviews that criticize this whiskey as being thin, flavorless, odorless, and alcoholic; and for the life of me, I don't know how the reviewers can be tasting the same Bourbon I am.

Barton Brands is not a big name in the Bourbon business. It owns a number of brands (Ten High, Tom Moore, etc.), but the only one before the advent of Ridgemont Reserve that had any degree of prestige was Very Old Barton. This has quite a good reputation, but it is distributed only very spottily outside of Kentucky. Most other distilleries, if they wanted to create a new brand of premium Bourbon, would have selected the "honey" barrels of their main brand because doing so would reduce the amount of time between the decision to launch the brand and the brand's actual lauch. Not Barton. Barton decided to create Ridgemont Reserve from the ground up, developing a new mashbill for it significantly different from the one used for Very Old Barton. Not only that, but they decided to change the mashbill not by doing anything traditional like substituting wheat for rye or increasing the rye content. They decided to jack up the percentage of malted barley used. Typically, the malt percentage in Bourbon and rye mashbills is very low, and the malt is only used for the enzymes it contains that convert the starch in the other, unmalted grains into sugars so that the yeast will have something to ferment. Barton is the only Bourbon distillery that uses it as a flavoring grain. I can't honestly claim to be able to taste the malt in Ridgemont Reserve, but I can say that Ridgemont Reserve is different from other Bourbons that I have tried.