Whiskey Advent Calendar Tasting: James Cree's Cattle Ranch Whiskey

This is part of my series on tasting notes from the 2021 Drinks By The Dram Bourbon Advent Calendar.

Whiskey for December 19th, 2021: James Cree's Cattle Ranch Whiskey

The distillery

Ok, buckle up, it's story time. So initially I had no idea what's going on here. James Cree's is not a distiller I've ever heard of and information is pretty light on them. After a strenuous 5 minutes of internet searching I found some info that James Cree's is likely related to Crabbie and Co Scotch, which used to be Crabbie and Cree, but went totally off the rails through the late 19th and early 20th century and stopped making whiskey.

It's worth noting as an aside that this is the Crabbie's Ginger Beer people if you've had that.

Anyhow, it seems that in 2007 John Crabbie & Co were bought by Halewood International of Liverpool, and they've started making whisky again. Checking out Halewood's brand page, we find James Cree's Cattle Ranch Whiskey.

So this appears to just be a bottler for other whiskeys. It explains how a scottish whiskey company is producing a "Tennessee Bourbon" (more on that below).

The whiskey

So Halewood International says this about tonight's whiskey:

Our whiskey includes a three year old ‘high rye’ straight Bourbon whiskey, a four year old, and an eight year old Tennessee whiskey which is charcoal filtered for extra smoothness.

This is very reminiscent of early High West products. I like blends if they're done well, but we're a bit in the dark about what's actually in this bottle. The mix of an actual bourbon and two Tennesse whiskeys explains the "Tennessee Bourbon" label though. However since we don't have an origin statement about the bourbon, I'm just going to call this "bourbon"

Look

A lighter golden brown, with golden highlights. It's clear and bright in the light. When swirled it quickly forms lots of legs, which run fairly quickly.

Nose

I'm happy to report it doesn't smell like scotch. It's sweet and sugary with a little fruity from the alcohol and if you take a deep enough breath you get some grassy rye hiding in the back. There's some oak kind of rounding it out and keeping it from being too cloying.

Taste

The front of the taste is smooth and sweet, but not particularly flavorful. There's a little caramel or butterscotch faintly hiding there. It's soon steamrolled by rye spice coming on with the alcohol and the whole thing fades back out with the faint caramel and black pepper. It's not very complex, but not unpleasant either.

After water

After a little water the nose loses its a lot of its sweetness and turns to very grassy rye. Almost fresh cut grassy and weak honey. It's not un-bourbon-like, but it's fairly simple and not very interesting.

Water also tames the rye and alcohol in the middle leaving a kind of weak, somewhat sweet and boring whiskey. It's real smooth now, I guess is the nice thing to say here.

Summary

There's nothing wrong with this whiskey. It's totally drinkable and the few flavors it puts forward taste fine. That said it's super boring. I wouldn't specifically want to drink this neat, but in a cocktail it would get totally lost. It'd be fine to booze up something you didn't want to really taste it in, but otherwise I can't recommend this unless you like simple bourbons. It's very simple. I'd avoid dilution though if you want it to hang on to anything more than a handful of tastes and smells.