I tasted 138 new whiskies in 2007. Some were fantastic, some were miserable. Here are the best of the best.
This is the question I get asked most often, well... aside from “Do you really drink all that?”. (Yes, I do. I'll cover that one in a moment.) I'm not sure why. I isn't as if Southern Comfort deserves fan support or needs me to bolster their business, but people are fascinated by its last-place standings. I think the combination of name recognition and the dubious honor of a score below 5 sparks some sort of reaction.
So, let's evaluate this from two angles.
First, SoCo is an ingredient by design.
Neither Southern Comfort nor its owner (Brown Foreman) sell the product as a premium drink to be had straight.
Every advertisement touts it with some other ingredient (SoCo and Lime seems popular lately), which is a surefire sign of a mixer.
So if it will soothe your ego, consider that baker's chocolate is a taste horror until mixed with other products to make tasty, tasty cake.
Now, if you've managed to ease your hackles back down you can ignore the rest of this post.
It's all subjective man, drink what makes you happy.
Second, SoCo is truly, spectacularly awful stuff. I have done two miserable tastings of SoCo to carefully avoid a bad first impression or a bad palate mix. Simply put, Southern Comfort fails in every possible category as a whisky / whisky product. It smells terrible (fake peach flavoring), it has no balance of flavor or texture, it casts you into a sea of razor-sharp alcohol and the bourbon-like flavoring is a high-vinegar, low quality monster that attempts to hide behind a wall of sugar. It lacks a single pleasant quality in flavor, feel or smell and it is the first and only whisky product that I have ever set down and backed away from. Care to read that again? I set my second ever glass of pure SoCo down, pushed my chair back and stepped three steps further back and shuddered. Even while taste testing Evan Williams Black and Banker's Club (the next 2 lowest scores) I muscled up the strenght to stay within 3 feet of the glass. That's why those get scores above 5 and SoCo doesn't.
Again, taste is subjective. Maybe you enjoy SoCo neat. There's plenty of foods that I dislike that others like and vice versa. Take, for example, the fact that most of my buddies wrinkle their noses when I pour a glass of peat-rich Ardbeg, a whisky that I scored at 90.
As for “Do you really drink all that”, the answer is that I have tasted every whisky on this list. Just because there is a picture of a 750ml bottle doesn't mean that I consumed 750ml. Some of these are bottles owned by friends, some are whiskies I tried at tastings and a few took on second jobs as weed killer or solvant. I may be willing to brave a SoCo or Banker's Club, but only twice.
As far as I can tell via research, was once the 86 proof second fiddle to the 90 proof .
The Black Label was the premium blend, the Green the lesser catch-all.
In 1989 the Black Label was reduced to 86 proof and the Green to 80 to avoid the limits set in certain states' Blue Laws.
In 2004 the Black dropped its alcohol content again to the lowest-possible 80 proof, bringing the two labels to a standard.
Around the same time, Jack's Green label started to disappear off of shelves in my region.
The local liquor store guys all seem to think Jack Daniels retired the Green Label and that all Jack Daniels Old No 7 product is sold under the Black Label.
But further afield you can still buy and order Green Label bottles, and clerks there assure me that there's still a quality difference between Green and Black and that most places just stopped buying the Green because it was priced almost exactly the same and they weren't motivated to shelve two nearly identical products only to have to answer questions about them.
Adding to the confusion, Jack Daniel's official site doesn't even mention the Green Label version!
So much for the research, are they really the same?
The Green Label I located was the first and only Green label I'd seen in the entire region, and I've been into a few liquor stores. The clerk believed that it had been sitting on that far back shelf since the 2004 shift. So if the pre-2004 40%ABV Green Label is the same glass in essance as the post-2004 40%ABV Black Label, a quick comparison should reveal it. Hopefully.
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←1 Get two identical glasses, clean them and mark each. These are my standard tasting glasses, both hand washed and dried. |
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| 2→ Get a bottle of JD Green and another of my minis of JD Black. I think I still have half a sleeve of thiese. |
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←3 Pour equally (about 50ml). | |
| 4. Mix the glasses, ditch the bottles and brace for impact. |
Are we starting to see the problem here?
Speyside 12 is a twelve year old whisky from the Speyside company & distillery, in the Speyside region.
Worse still is that the distillery had several wonderful names at its fingertips:
Whisky, especially Single Malt Scotch, is a luxury product. While one lower-shelf blend might be just as good as the next, people are clearly willing to pay a lot to get quality, individuality and craftsmanship in the top shelf Scotch. They have no shortage of options available including whiskies from some of the largest companies in the world with a rainbow of ages, finishes and styles to choose from. In that luxury marketplace, "generic" is exactly how you don't want to be identified and “Speyside” is just that.
It's a rather interesting place to stand, looking back on 100 whiskies. In contrast to most professional or hardcore amateur tasters one hundred is but a pittance. Jim Murray and Michael Jackson count their tastings in quadruple digits, and batch variation or not those are hard numbers to contemplate. At my rate of tasting it might take me decades to reach a thousand whiskies, and that's even assuming I could continue to find new whiskies in the narrow price and availability ranges that I've set.
In the other glass are those who have barely ventured beyond the first glass they stumbled across that was drinkable. I know of family members who might sooner change their citizenship than their preferred glass of poison. I won't begrudge their contentment, exploration can be a painful affair, especially when you dig into dark corners and let the thrill of novelty overwhelm your normal sense of caution.
It's hard to describe the thrill of buying a bottle of something I've never tried, especially if it's truly novel. Even an unusual expression from a familiar distillery can provoke excitement, and I think this feeling must be what drives collectors of stamps or antiques. Better still if the bottle is a smaller size (and thus cost), and best of all are those rare sampler packs that contain miniature mysteries in sets.
So, a few conclusions as we travel onward into the future.
I picked up a copy of Jim Murray's Whisky Bible a few days ago, complimenting the other books on the subject that I own. Now I have nothing but the utmost respect for Mister Murry. His tasting and nosing notes are always comprehensive, enlightening, instructive and often amusing and the book is a wealth of fantastic information about a world I am just starting to get a feel for. However, and this is a big however, his scoring numbers frankly and bluntly and in my personal opinion, sucks.
Understand that this is not about differing tastes.
If Mister Murray, in his years of professional experience and with his highly respected tongue wants to give Inver House a -90- (!?) then so be it. Now to me, a score of 90 out of 100 implies that the majority of all other whiskies on earth taste worse than Inver House GP and but a scant handful are in any way better. He even grades such bottles as Johnnie Walker Gold and Bruichladdich 15 as near equals. Maybe Mister Murray thinks this is so, I think the stuff is pretty awful and deserves a shelf lower than the floor-level one you tend to see it on, but such is the wonder and diversity of life.
Nay, my problem is that even whiskies described as "grim" and "unpleasant" in this book score above 50, often well into the 60s. Admittedly in the USA we're preoccupied by report card letter grades of A through D, and anything below a 75 is somehow a failure. This leads me to believe that many scores (not just Jim's) are shifted up to put them in this range for psychological reasons. I can't speak with any authority on this, not being associated with Mr. Murray, but mathmatically a 50 is dead average and a 60 is thus better than average, not terrible! So if 50 represents some line between displeasure and enjoyement, a score of 60 cannot by definition be "grim" or "unpleasant".
In the end it detracts only a bit from my otherwise thourough enjoyment of the book, one that I recommend to anyone looking to explore the wide world of whisky. I will not, however, but adjusting my scoring system to match. In my last tasting I hovered around giving a whisky a score of 60, something that by Murry's scale would be godawful whereas I enjoyed the whisky quite a bit but didn't want to overpraise it with a "recommendable" nod. Ah, well. When I'm king I'll set all these wrongs to right... or when Mr. Murray is king he can correct my heresy. And I'm only picking on Jim because I just got (and devoured) his book so recently.
While I was no slouch at math in college, I apparently retained very little if my attempts to build a weighted score are any indication. At first there were linear adjustments based on price, which dragged the ugly ducklings of the lower shelf up into the light, blinking and mewing like freak cave fish under the noonday sun. Next I tried to create intersecting lines of price and taste, adding and subtracting and dividing until numbers appeared that seemed cryptic and alien. Finally I struck upon the joy of a weighted bonus, which seemed to do things better until I realized that three whiskies had better than 100 scores.
Finally, here we are.
((((-1/2)*($cost-10) + 25)*($taste/50))/$highest_score)*100
Just LOOK at it. It makes you tingle, doesn't it?
Maybe in the back of your brain? No? Ok, follow along:
There are really 3 parts:
First:
((((-1/2)*($cost-10) + 25)*($taste/50))/$highest_score)*100
is y=mx+b, the formula for a line.
The variable y is the bonus to the score, from 25 to -25 points.
The variable m is the rise/run, in my case 50 points of bonus over 100 dollars of cost. It's negative because the score goes down as the price goes up.
The variable x is the cost, in this case with $10 taken off, since $10 dollars is the lowest cost you'll find for a bottle.
The variable b is the intercept, at 25 points.
So a bottle can earn up to 25 points for being cheap and lose... well an infinite amount of points for being expensive. $110 is the upper limit to lose 25 points, but the line continues forever, just look at Johnny Walker Blue.
The second part:
((((-1/2)*($cost-10) + 25)*($taste/50))/$highest_score)*100
is a modifier for the bonus.
The taste score is divided by 50 and multipled against the bonus.
High scoring bottles get bigger bonuses, low scoring bottles get smaller bonuses, see?
This prevents a crappy but cheap bottle from scoring well purely because it's dirt cheap and gives a solid boost to the good whiskies.
The final part:
((((-1/2)*($cost-10) + 25)*($taste/50))/$highest_score)*100
produces a percentage score against the highest scoring whisky.
To make this truly dynamic I'd have the highest score calculated every time, but that's a lot of overhead for something that almost never changes, so any time a bottle challenges the very top scores for practicality I manually update this entry.
This means that the highest scoring whisky automatically scores a 100 (which it was anyway under the previous system) while the rest fall out as percents versus this top scorer.
And thus is my 100 point color graph maintained.
Whisky makers, and the bourbon guys especially, are fascinated with assuring the buying public that their product is the result of some ancient process handed down through sixty generations of bearded old men, written in cryptic runes on parchment and locked in the lowest depths of a secret castle vault, opened only at the full moon to be peered over by candlelight. This works to some degree in Scotland and Ireland where there is, allegedly anyway, a lineage of distilling whisky going back to the days of castles and monks. These are people you might want to actually be handling your beverages, at least through the distorted lens of legend and the soft romantic glow of myth.
Bourbon makers, however, have a problem. The history of that region of the USA really only stretches back to the 1800s, seeing as none of the Natives were versed in the lore of distilling grain spirits. Further, there's really not much romantic about the whole enterprise. Kentucky was good whisky country for two reasons: good water and limited government oversight. It was full of Scotts and Irishmen who wanted to farm and drink without the government charging them taxes, especially after the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s. Add to that the bloody American Civil War, the lawless expansion westward and the weakness of government sanitary regulations until World War II and you have less a recipe for nostalgia and more a rocky start to be sprinted away from.
And yet words like "Old", "Ancient" and "Early" appear on bottle after bottle. Beyond that are the frontier references like Buffalo and, well... "frontier". Let me tell you, when I think of frontier Americans out in the old west, sanitary conditions do not immediately spring to mind. I see an old man, hunched over from panning gold or chasing livestock in a rough country full of danger and disease drinking a jug of hooch to numb his pain. A jug of hooch that he or one of his buddies cooked up in an attempt to avoid paying top dollar for the bottles imported (at some cost) from the nearest city. There's little reason to savor that moment.
| Row indicator, not the ID of the whisky.# |
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| Awards that this whisky has earned from meAwards | ||||||||||||||||||
| 1 | Old Forrester | NAS |  |  | $ 15 | 58 | 65 |  | ||||||||||||||||||||
| 2 | Old Grand-Dad | 100 proof Bonded | | | $ 20 | 51 | 55 | | ||||||||||||||||||||
| 3 | Old Grand-Dad | NAS | | | $ 15 | 47 | 55 | | ||||||||||||||||||||
| 4 | George Dickel | Old No 8 Brand | |  | $ 15 | 45 | 53 | | ||||||||||||||||||||
| 5 | Old Overholt | Straight Rye 4 YO | | 4 |  | $ 15 | 43 | 51 | | |||||||||||||||||||
| 6 | Old Crow | 3 YO | | 3 | | $ 10 | 35 | 45 | | |||||||||||||||||||
| 7 | Jack Daniels | Old No 7 Black Label | | | $ 20 | 34 | 38 | |
In order to justify the somewhat arbitrary nature of scoring, I thought I'd put down in writing the exact process by which I toss out numbers to whiskies. On one hand the idea of assigning an objective score to something as subjective as taste is unfair, especially in cases where a flavor like peat can be a real turnoff to a drinker. On the other, this is my 2 cents (see the top of the page) and if you like similar whiskies than it can be of some use to get an opinion.
The score represents the sum of the drinking experience from first sniff to last sip. If I've enjoyed the experience at all it ranks at least a 50, meaning I'd pay money to relive it. If I truly enjoyed it the score climbs, 60 means I'd pay for someone else to enjoy the whisky, 70 means I'd give it as a general gift or serve it at an occation, 80 means I'd give it at a special occation and 90 means it blew me away in taste. Each level represents a clear line in the sand in my mind and I will generally have scored a whisky into one of these categories within a few seconds of finishing the nosing and second sip.
From here it becomes a process of refinement. Adding water, letting the whisky breathe or otherwise changing the way I'm drinking the wisky might allow it to shift a slot, but this isn't that common. In my experience only adding water will shift a whisky by more than a few points, and this usually only happens when diluting high proof (cask strength) whiskies. Otherwise I will give a rough score in my notes (mid 60s, high 40s, etc) and carefully note why I had that particular range in mind. Finally, I break out the tasting notes of whiskies near the score point I'm considering and move the whisky up or down in relationship to those.
If I'm thinking mid-60s, for example, I'd look at other mid-60s whiskies and read the notes on taste and finish. This gives me a basic benchmark to compare the whisky to. I'd love to do real benchmarking, having a 60-point whisky on hand to compare the current glass to would be wonderful, and expensive. Sadly, I must use my notes and memory to do the final bit of tweaking, moving the score around a few points to see where the whisky falls on the list or finding a whisky that was clearly superior, inferior or the same. In the end, I may even have to shift other scores to make room, but this is thankfully not very common.
And yet in the end what I have is a somewhat arbitrary list of scores for whiskies I've tried months or years apart. Memory is a fickle thing and my tastes in whisky have grown over time. I regularly note Cardu on the list as a low-scoring whisky from ages past and wonder if it deserves a second chance or if I'd be wasting my money in a vain attempt to be fair.
Somehow I've become the expert on computers and whisky within certain circles of my friends and relatives and my advice is occasionally sought in matters of gift ideas. When it comes to whisky this can be a real problem. The conversation usually goes along these lines: Person a, who I know and will call Adam wants to buy a gift of whisky for person X, who I don't know and will call Xavier. Adam knows that Xavier drinks whisky and wants to use that as a foundation for a gift. I also drink whisky and should therefore know immediately what Xavier likes, dislikes and what the perfect present would be for say, forty bucks including tax.
There are several problems with this scenario, with the most important being that whisky drinkers come in several varieties and buying the right gift for the wrong variety will make your present useless. So here, for everyone to enjoy, is my advice on buying a present for a whisky drinker. The key to all this is to find out what group they belong to:
1) Mixers: People who mix whisky are, in my experience, creatures of habit. No, more than that, creatures of ritual. A mixer drinks X whisky with Y mixers in Z glass with exactly the same volume of liquid, number of ice cubes and seat on the couch every time they drink. Its a process that brings relaxation, contentment and enjoyment. This is challenging terrain. Your gift, no matter what it is, could very well interfere with this ritual and may not be appreciated. The mixer isn't going to want a new whisky, they've got one, and probably have quite a bit of it in stock. The mixer isn't going to want new mixing ingredients for the same reason. The mixer isn't going to want a new or different step in the ritual. So your options are thinning rapidly. You could attempt to improve one item of the ritual, either buying a nicer set of similar style glasses or tools. You could attempt to improve the environment, such as buying a bottle rack or tumbler shelf. Or you could move on to other areas of gift giving.
2) Brand Drinkers: A whisky drinker who has established a brand preference (lets say Bushmills) and drinks it somewhat regularly is a great gift target. They've found something they like and are happy, but probably not so set in their ways that they wouldn't stray if offered the opportunity. In this case you have two options, go up or go sideways. “Up” means upshelf. If they drink Bushmills White, buy them a bottle of Bushmills Black or Single Malt. “Sideways” means buy them something similar from a different line. While there are some Bushmills versus Jameson hardliners, you'd probably meet little resistance to a Redbreast, Connemara or Brennans.
3) Aficionados: A real whisky drinker who knows his stuff will be satisfied with something good, but your real goal here is novelty. Aficionados love new things, and will appreciate an odd whisky they've never had, even if it turns out to be barely drinkable. Although it may take some investigating, find out if they've ever had a single malt from New Zealand or Japan or the USA and if not, buy them one. The joy of the unexpected and untasted is key and they will be truly thankful that you took the time and effort to track something down for them.
Being quite frank, I dread tasting certain bottles in my on-deck collection, even having no rational reason to feel such. I've come to recognize the feeling, despite my attempts to quell it. The excitement of reaching for a new experience in whisky is mingled with the dread that this major market brand is going to be swill, based purely on my perceptions of how its been marketed, packaged, priced or shelved.
Blind tastes help to avoid this prejudice, but "blind" is really an overoptimistic description. Without having someone else purchase and repackage the bottle it's a struggle to insulate myself from finding out what's in the glass. After all, I bought it so I have a very good idea of what's left in the blind bag. Bottle shapes, cap styles (plastic versus metal) and colors, even glass versus plastic can be clues to the contents and my attempts to limit this have met mixed success.
In the end, I've given up trying to be blind and have started to disassemble my prejudices. Several very drinkable whiskies, after all, can be bought for less than thirty bucks and many of the mass marketed brands have managed to live up to their hype. Not all of them, of course, but if I can keep in mind the surprise pleasure found in a Wild Turkey and the unjustified hesitation I felt in buying Maker's Mark, then I can hopefully shelve my expectations no matter what the label on the bottle says.
Although for every Wild Turkey there's a Canadian Mist...
As much as it pains me to expand my scope of reviews, I've decided to add whisky liqueurs to the list. They must describe their main ingredient as whisky on either the bottle or advertising content and must be available in 750ml bottles. This will bring such notable brands as Baileys and the already reviewed Southern Comfort to the table. However, these will not be reviewed as ingredients in mixers or cocktails, they will be reviewed neat, just as all the other whiskies are.
My decision is partly based on the variety, availability and low cost of such products and party based on the fact that I've suffered through Southern Comfort twice now in an attempt to properly review it and I don't want that effort to be in vain. I think these are, more or less, practical products and should be given a shot. I can't wait to describe exactly how much I will come to regret this decision.
According to Google there are 1000+ liquor stores in the region where I live. I'm sure that includes mini-marts, gas stations and grocery stores with licenses, but it gives me a rough idea as to the scale of the market. A market that I believe is saturated with what I call "Bud and Jack" stores, catering to the unfortunately large portion of the local population who equate beer only with Bud Light and Liquor only with Jack Daniels or some other mid to lower shelf booze. Now to be fair those particular stores exist to make money, not educate their consumers so as to diversify their tastes. I rarely shop at these establishments, and you shouldn't either.
I have discovered a handful of higher end stores who have gone out of their way to stock good wine, good beer and good liquor and I will drive the extra distance to shop there. Frequenting these stores is rewarding in several key areas. First, after getting to know the staff at these stores, I don't get stared at if I pull out a pad of paper and make notes of product and pricing. They know I shop there and I'm not some competitor checking on their stock. Second, they tolerate me taking my time and blocking their aisles because I'm a regular and they know I'll eventually buy something. Finally, they are ready and willing to give advice in a number of areas. While I enjoy whisky (as demonstrated by this site) I also drink beer and wine and store clerks and owners have been incredibly helpful in expanding my understanding and appreciation of what's available, especially in the vast universe of wine.
Just as an example, I've never tasted a port I liked very much until very recently. While on the hunt for some Ice wine (something you should try if you can) a liquor store owner took me to a tasting area and poured me a fantastic port and apple ice wine that I would never have known existed. The port is now on my short list of future purchases and two bottles of the ice apple wine went home with me. One ended up wrapped up for Christmas, the other went straight to the fridge. We also discussed whisky, upcoming deals, and the owner pointed out a bottle of bourbon that I've never seen on a shelf anywhere. He wasn't fazed in the least by my passing on the chance to buy it, after all he knows that I'll be back.
Find a good store and ask their advice, the rewards are many and often come in unexpected flavors.
As much as I enjoy reading taste notes of fabulous and exotic whiskies, they serve only as intellectual curiosities rather than any sort of practical advice. When I read some famous taster rave about a fifty year old Speysider or some dusty bottle from an abandoned distillery it activates the same section of brain as reading a magazine article about test driving a Ferrari. I will never own a Ferrari, as fantastic a car as it might be, and I will never drink a 30+ year old bottle of Macallan, as fantastic a whisky as it might be. Standing in my local, suburban liquor store and gazing at the rows of bottles I, like most people, have to weigh the pleasure of the drink against the cost of the purchase. Its economics at work, and practicality is the rule.
Of the excellent liquor stores I frequent, only one has triple digit priced whiskies on the actual shelves for me to pick up and handle. The rest have them tucked away behind the counter or in glass cases, and most have but a handful of the biggest named distilleries. There are no 30 year old Macallans or Brora's from 1972 or their thousand dollar kin on display. That upper echelon of whisky is but myth and legend to me, for I have car payments and a mortgage and a family. When I leave the store with a paper bag and my purchase, there will be no wooden case to protect the bottle. I'll be lucky if it even comes in a cardboard box or tin.
I harbor no ill will to these tasters, aside an admitted bit of jealousy. I look forward to reading their exploration of the rarefied air atop the tallest whisky mountains, mountains that I shall never climb. I am content to remain here, among the common folk who just want to drop fifty bucks on a bottle of something that will bring them pleasure rather than work as an antiseptic. They need a practical whisky, and I hope my advice helps.
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Canada - Best Taste
Ireland - Best Taste
Scotland - Best Taste
