There will be no post this week, as it’s my birthday and I’m going to spend it drinking whisky instead of analyzing it. I’m not going to go off on a riff about how sometimes you need to forget the scores and drama and what’s on the label and just enjoy your whisky, because I …
Elijah Craig is a small-batch bourbon made by prolific distiller Heaven Hill in Bardstown, Kentucky, and is named after Reverend Elijah Craig who is apocryphally credited with the invention of oak aging of corn whisky to create bourbon. This version replaces the old 12 year-old bottling, and is instead comprised of whiskey aged between 8 and 12 years.
…Bacalta, for instance, is aged in standard ex-bourbon casks and then finished in Malmsey Madeira wine casks. Apparently “Bacalta” is Scots Gaelic for “Baked”, and these casks were, at one point, “baked under the sun” or some nonsense. Personally, I think that means someone forgot the shipment from Madeira had arrived in the parking lot and left the barrels there for a few weeks before someone brought them inside, but maybe I’m a skeptic.
Anchor Distillers (which is a distillery in California, but also does business importing and bottling sourced spirits) has loaded down the Hirsch label with every whisky marketing adjective in the book. This is – no, really – Small-Batch Reserve Selected Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which is “Crafted” in the USA. It also says “artisanally produced” on the back. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone accusing MGP of being a “craft” distillery, but there’s the word on the bottle none-the-less.
A quick little mid-week diversion: The folks at Invaluable have put together a fun whisky infographic for beginners, along with a coherent introduction (of sorts) to whisky for my fellow noobs out there. I was happy to provide them some feedback and correct a few errors, and so they credited me as a contributor. Here’s a peek at the infographic, click on it for more.