Whiskey Advent Calendar Tasting: Charcoal & Cornmeal & Rickhouses & a Decade
This is part of my series on tasting notes from the 2021 Drinks By The Dram Bourbon Advent Calendar.
Whiskey for December 13th, 2021: Charcoal & Cornmeal & Rickhouses & a Decade
The distillery
Another whiskey from Atom Labs
The whiskey
Tonight's whiskey is Charcoal & Cornmeal & Rickhouses & a Decade which I will now refer to as CCRD, because that's too much to type. The last Atom Labs whiskey was not something I enjoyed and most of it went down the sink.
This appears to be a 10-year aged bourbon that we know very little else about. This seems to be Atom Labs modus operandi.
Look
CCRD is very light honey colored with mild red highlights. This is quite light for a bourbon, especially a 10 year, so I question if it's really legally a bourbon in that it was aged in new casks. Glycerine is moderate with reasonable cling, but few legs.
Nose
The nose is fairly subtle. There's a little lemony citrus, some vanilla, and something I can't quite place. A sourness apart from the lemon hiding in the background. It reminds me a little of scotch, but it can't be peat.
Taste
Again, this tastes like a slightly more sweet highland scotch. It doesn't make me think of a bourbon at all. There's a little butterscotch sweetness at the front, there's a little rye spice and black pepper in the middle, and it finishes with what I would swear is peat and just a hint of vanilla waaaaay at the end of the finish. It's not smokey, but the antiseptic peat funkiness is there. The flavor is extremely mild to boot, which again, would be unusual for a true 10-year old bourbon. Though if you aged it like a scotch, I could see that.
It is extremely smooth, so it tastes mature, just not very complex.
After water
The nose is basically gone. It's like lemon and butterscotch traces from across the room, even with my nose down in it. In its defense, the sour peat smell is also gone! I might get a little apple or dried fruit in the nose that wasn't there before.
The taste is completely dead. There's rye spice and peat funk and that's about it. The sweetness is mellowed so much it might as well not be there.
Summary
I genuinely dislike this "bourbon". It doesn't taste like bourbon. It doesn't even look like bourbon. It's basically scotch. It's not even good scotch though. I don't even understand what the Atom Labs guys are trying to do. They're zero for two here. I wouldn't purposefully try anything else they've touched after this.