Last Night's Tipple

Just like beer enthusiasts like nothing better than to disparage Budweiser and Miller products, American whiskey enthusiasts like to trash Jim Beam and Jack Daniel's. Obviously, some of this criticism owes to the fact that the main bottling from neither brand (White Label from Beam; Black Label from JD) is exactly a top-shelf product. It's possible to get better whiskeys, often for less money. But let's be honest: a good part of this disdain is due to the fact that both are ubiquitous and universally-known. A snob takes no pleasure in enjoying something that everybody else enjoys. Put Jim Beam White Label Bourbon or JD Black Label Tennessee whiskey into a bottle with a different label at $4 less a bottle, and you would have many the same enthusiasts raving about what great "value" pours they were. And this snobbery carries over into other products made by these distilleries. Beam Black Label, Knob Creek, Baker's, Booker's -- they're all crap. Same thing goes for Gentleman Jack and JD Single Barrel from Jack Daniel's.

Well, this is ridiculous. Both Beam and JD know how to make good whiskey, and JD Single Barrel is a very good whiskey. I wager that most of those that trash it on the basis of its JD affiliation would change their tune if they tried it blind.

Last Night's Tipple

Everything about Tennessee Whiskey is the same as Bourbon except for the Lincoln County Process (ie, filtering the white dog -- new-make spirit -- through sugar maple charcoal prior to barreling it). The mashbill is the same kind that you would find in a Bourbon, the distillation is identical, the barrels are identical. It's just the Lincoln County Process that is different. And it makes a tremendous difference. Every Tennessee Whiskey that I've ever had -- Jack Daniel's Black Label, George Dickel No. 8, George Dickel No. 12, and Jack Daniel's Single Barrel -- has had a distinctive sooty aroma and flavor. It has to be the Lincoln County Process that creates this characteristic. And yet that makes no sense to me. The spirit spends a few days filtering through the charcoal. It spends several years inside a charred oak barrel. One would expect that effect of the char from the barrels would swamp the effect of the charcoal, but it doesn't.

Anyway, JD Single Barrel remains an excellent whiskey. It's got the distinctive Tennessee Whiskey sootiness and a whole lot more. It's not cheap, but it's not a bad value.

Last Night's Tipple

I was in the mood to try Jack Daniel's Single Barrel again last night, despite the fact that I had had it just last week. It's surprising just how different this is from Bourbon, despite the fact that almost everything about its production is identical to Bourbon production. It's sooty and sweet in a way that Bourbon just isn't. Given just how much of an American straight whiskey is influenced by the barrels that it's aged in, it makes very little sense to me that passing new-make spirit through 20 feet of maple charcoal would make a big difference in the character of the whiskey, but it does.

And yes, this is still very good whiskey.

Last Night's Tipple

The way to growth for most large producers of alcohol these days is to sell less volume at higher prices. People around the world are drinking less than they did, but they are buying more expensive alcohol. Most producers have to accept that their case volume will decline year over year, and the only way that they can make up the difference is to sell better stuff more expensively. Not Jack Daniel's, though. Their case volume (8.9 million cases last year) is increasing at 6% a year. When you combine the increasing case volume with the annual price increases that Brown-Forman, the corporate parent of Jack Daniel's, Jack Daniel's practically has a license to print money. It would be difficult to overstate how influential Jack Daniel's is in the world of whiskey. Brands ranging from Jim Beam Black Label to Evan Williams have copied JD's square bottle shape and label style. Boutique offerings like Maker's Mark raise their prices in lockstep with JD's increases. Used JD barrels go all over the world to producers of just about every kind of spirit: Ardbeg, probably the most distinctive Islay malt whisky, ages their whisky almost exclusively in old JD barrels.

More than three quarters of that is the standard Old No. 7 Black Label bottling, and most of the remaining is either Green Label No. 7 or Gentleman Jack, which differs from the rest in that it's charcoal filtered twice instead of once. I'm not a big fan of the standard Black Label bottling. It's young, one-dimensional, and has some off-putting flavors. I've never tried Green Label or Gentleman Jack, but my understanding is that Green Label tastes even younger than Black Label and that the Gentleman Jack, what with the double filtration, is even more one-dimensional. Which brings us to the last of Jack Daniel's bottlings: the Single Barrel. As the name suggests, "honey barrels" are dumped and bottled one at a time to make Single Barrel. The whiskey contained in these barrels has been aged between 6 and 8 years, or between 50% and 100% longer than the standard 4 year old JD Black Label. I'm not sure if Master Distiller Jimmy Bedford knows that a whiskey will become Single Barrel when he puts it into the barrel, but I would imagine at the very least that he, like every other competent distiller, knows which areas of which warehouses are likely to produce the quality and flavor profile he's looking for. It's bottled at 94 proof, too, which means that it has more concentration and more of a kick than the Black Label, which is bottled at 80 proof. The bottle that I bought on Saturday was from barrel 6-3094, rick L-34, and was bottled on August 17, 2006. This is largely just marketing fluff because these are utterly meaningless to me and I'm unlikely ever to find another bottle from the same barrel (each barrel produces approximately 240 750 ml bottles). In any event, though, the whiskey inside is very good. It has the distinctive JD smoky sweetness, but there's more vanilla and caramel on the nose. It's lighter than a comparably-aged Bourbon, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. At $35 a fifth, JD Single Barrel is not a bargain, but it's not a rip-off. And I'm glad to be able to say that the largest American whiskey distiller is capable of making excellent whiskey if they want to.

Last Night's Tipple

Another pour of George Dickel Number 12 for me, and this one killed the bottle. My impressions this time were similar to the last time I wrote about Dickel, but I would amplify a couple of things. First is that Dickel, like Jack Daniel's is very sweet. Alcohol can impart sweet flavors by its very nature, and this tendency is accentuated by the caramelization that aging the spirit in charred new oak barrels imparts. But while Bourbon is sweet, Tennessee Whiskey is sweeter, probably because the Lincoln County process (filtering the white dog spirit through twenty feet of maple charcoal before it goes into the barrel) adds even more caramelization on top of what the barrel does. Second, it really is amazing how much better Dickel is after a half hour in the glass than it is freshly poured. With time in the glass, a wonderful vanilla aroma develops that is much, much more appetizing than the unbaked apple pie aroma that it has straight out of the bottle.

Since it won't do to be completely out of Tennessee Whiskey for very long, I will be forced to buy another bottle of either Dickel or Jack Daniels some time soon. This next go around, though, I think that I'll try one of the premium bottlings: either JD Single Barrel or George Dickel Barrel Select. I hear that both are good...

Last Night's Tipple

Since I finished a bottle of Jack Daniel's on Sunday night, I figured that I might as well turn to a bottle of George Dickel last night, both because the bottle was getting low and because George Dickel is the only other Tennessee Whiskey on the market. Specifically, the bottle was George Dickel No. 12 Tennessee Whisky (notice the lack of the "e" in "whisky", which implies that the original George Dickel either tried to conjure Scotch whisky with the name or that he couldn't spell), which is the older of the two commonly-available bottlings (No. 8 is the younger). As one would expect, it is similar in character to Jack Daniel's -- sooty and yeasty. It has more apple overtones than does JD, and with some time in the glass, it develops more vanilla aromas, which I like. It's a better whiskey than JD for about the same price. It's also 90 proof to JD's current 80 proof.

George Dickel is owned by Diageo, the corporate parent that also owns the Johnnie Walker Scotch brand and several big-name Scotch malt distilleries (Oban, Lagavulin, Talisker, and Dalwhinnie, among others). Back in the late '90s, one of Diageo's predecessor companies (UDV) started the Classic Malts Collection to showcase their malt properties. It was a stroke of marketing genius because it introduced the public to distilleries that they might never have heard of before and because it allowed UDV to charge a premium price for the spirits produced by them. The most commonly-available expression of Talisker is the 10 year-old, which sells in the US for around $50 a fifth, or about $20 more than most 10 year olds. That's due to a shortage of Talisker relative to demand, but what created the demand? Sure, Talisker is great whisky, but UDV/Diageo marketing muscle had to have some effect. Anyway, because of the success of the Cleassic Malts Collection and the advent of Jim Beam's Small Batch Bourbon Collection, UDV decided to start the Bourbon Heritage Collection to showcase the best that their American whiskey properties had to offer. The BHC included special bottlings from George Dickel, IW Harper, Old Charter, WL Well, and Old Fitzgerald. Shortly thereafter, UDV merged with Grand Met to form Diageo and promptly ditched all of these brands except for George Dickel. The BHC is now defunct, unfortunately.

The George Dickel distillery was silent from 1999 to 2003, which means that the younger No. 8 bottling is in short supply and will be for the next couple of years. I would imagine that starting in 2009, there will be a corresponding shortage of No. 12.

Last Night's Tipple

Jack Daniel's, you ask? Yes, Jack Daniel's. I've had a bottle (the same bottle) open for more than three years, just taking up space. This taking up space thing is becoming a problem. My liquor cabinet is actually a little Ikea tray table thingee, and I have so many bottles that I can no longer fit new ones on it. So now my counter has a bunch of liquor bottles on it. The thing is that a number of bottles on the tray are almost empty. Therefore, this week's theme will be Kill the Bottle. First up was a bottle of JD with about one pour left in it.

The full and complete name of the whiskey contained therein is Jack Daniel's Old Time Old No. 7 Brand Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey, Black Label. You can understand why most people just call it Jack Daniel's or JD or Black Jack. This is the second best-selling whiskey in the world (behind Johnnie Walker Red), and the folks at Brown-Forman, who own the distillery, really have done a fantastic job at branding the whiskey. It's everywhere. It's probably almost as well-known in the United States as Coca-Cola. But how's the whiskey? Well, I don't know how the current incarnation is (they dropped it to 80 proof a couple of years ago; this bottle is of the old 86 proof). What I had was not bad. The dominant note on the nose is soot at first. With a bit of time, I can also smell yeast, grain, and apples. I also get grain, minerals, and apples on the palate. With a bit of time in the glass, there are also hints of vanilla, but they never really become distinct. The whiskey is a bit rough and young, not appallingly so, but I can certainly notice it. Like I said, it's not bad. At $20 a fifth, though, I can get any number of better Bourbons. I don't think that I'll be buying more any time soon.

So, you ask, is Jack Daniel's Bourbon? It doesn't call itself Bourbon. It calls itself Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey. Well, the thing is that there is no such thing as Tennessee Whiskey in the liquor laws of the United States. The distillery got a letter from the Department of the Treasury in 1941 saying that Tennessee Whiskey was a distinctive form of whiskey, but a letter is not the same as a law. The fact of the matter is that Jack Daniel's does one and only one thing differently from all the producers of Bourbon in the United States: they subject the newly-distilled spirit to the Lincoln County Process, which consists of filtering the spirit through about 10 feet of sugar maple charcoal. Is using the Lincoln County Process enough to disqualify the whiskey from calling itself Bourbon? Only if you conclude that the process adds unnatural coloring or flavoring to the whiskey, which the laws prohibit for Bourbon. It's a debatable point, but I don't think that it does. Now, it's not in the brand's best interest to call it Bourbon, so they never will try. But I think that it technically is.

Oh, and why did Jack Daniel's cut the proof from 86 to 80 a couple of years ago? I don't know exactly why, but money had to have something to do with it. Spirits are taxed by the US government on the basis of the number of "proof gallons" produced. A proof gallon is a gallon of 100 proof spirits. Therefore, cutting the proof saves Jack Daniel's and its corporate parent money, to the tune of $13 million on the 9 million cases they sell per year. Either that, or they could expand their production but keep the tax bill the same. Since most people who consume JD probably don't sip it straight, I imagine that they thought that their consumers would never notice the difference.