Whiskey Tasting: Orphan Barrel Rhetoric 23-year-old Bourbon

This last whiskey from my guided tasting was part of my personal stock. When I bought it, it ran about 140 dollars and now sees prices 3x that amount. I originally purchased this based on rumblings among bourbon drinkers of it being "the best bourbon you can buy on the market right now" and being "budget pappy". The latter one doesn't mean much to me, because I don't think any of the Pappy Van Winkle bourbons older than 16 years are any good. They're overly busy and too oaky. I'll admit I tend to judge people who say Pappy Van Winkle 21 or 23 or some large number is their favorite whiskey or, even worse, "the best whiskey you can buy".

Good luck buying Pappy Van Winkle, for starters, and if you spend the money on it, you have too much money, I'll fill a shelf full of better product for you if you give me enough for a bottle of 23 year. But I digress.

I presented this bourbon to the group as a "mystery bourbon". I didn't want the age statement, or even the name, to color anyone's opinion on what they were about to taste. The general assessment was, it's fine, but not great and most (all?) would rather drink the other stuff presented. It's about what I figured, whiskeys like this tend to coast on their advanced age statement and the surrounding mystique.

Whiskey Tasting: Orphan Barrel Rhetoric 23-year-old Bourbon

The distillery

So the original distillate for tonight's whiskey is supposed to have come from Heaven Hill. Surprisingly, Heaven Hill didn't come up during the advent and so this is our first example of a Heaven Hill product. Heaven Hill is a moderately aged distillery, starting up in 1935 in Bardstown, Kentucky (just outside of Louisville). The Heaven Hill Bernheim distillery, however, is in Louisville itself.

Heaven Hill is the seventh-largest alcohol supplier in the US and the second-largest holder of bourbon whiskey inventory in the world. It is also the largest independent and family owned producer of distilled spirits in the US. Brown-Forman is the largest family owned producer, but they're not independent.

All of Heaven Hill's master distillers have been members of the Beam family, starting with Joseph L. Beam, Jim's first cousin, and all the way up to Parker and Craig beam.

Heaven Hill makes a number of well known budget to mid-grade bourbons like Elijah Craig, Evan Williams, Heaven Hill, Kentucky Straight, Larceny, Old Fitzgerald and a few others.

The whiskey

So this whiskey started as Heaven Hill distillate, made in the Heaven Hill Bernheim distillery. At some point, after barrelling, it was moved to the Stitzel-Weller aging warehouses and was "discovered" by Diageo who now release the product progressively starting with a 20-year expression and have released yearly to a 25-year expression. This is the 23-year expression. Aside from that, we know very little about this product, other than it's very old and getting pretty hard to find.

Look

This bourbon is the color of high quality honey with just a little hint of red mixed in. It's clear with brilliant gold highlights. It takes it time after a swirl to form numerous, and extremely slow moving, legs.

Nose

Oak. So there are a lot of bits to the nose, but they're all dominated by the fact that it's like sniffing them in the lumber section of the home depot. The nose starts with cherries, orange, and brown sugar. You move into rye, caramel, roses. It ends with butterscotch. So it's pretty amazing how much is just on the nose, it runs a gamut that you don't see very often, but to be clear, everything is underscored with a lot of oak.

Taste

Oak. Again, there's a lot of flavor here, and all of it tastes like you're sucking it off of a chewed up pencil. The oak give this weird mouth puckering dryness to it as well, despite a lot of sweet flavors.

So we start with cherries and brown sugar. The alcohol opens up to black pepper, cinnamon, and more brown sugar notes. The alcohol carries some of the floral/rose-like taste we got in the smell. There's a little orange hiding with both the front and middle of the palate. The finish comes of with leather, oak, minty rye, a little cinnamon hanging on.

This is remarkably smooth as well, the alcohol bloom is very mild, just enough to carry the spice in the middle. The finish lasts a long time, but is mainly oak and leather.

After water

A little water tamps down the cherry and our citrus moves more lemony. We also lose a lot of the sweetness. I didn't add much water, and it has really ground down the subtleties of the nose.

On the taste we get sharper citrus and less sweetness. The alcohol barely blooms now, so we have a hint of black pepper and cinnamon to round out the caramel that carries it all. The finish is hard to pick out because the finish from the unaltered product still hasn't completely gone away despite 5 minutes and numerous drinks of water. What I do get is that the cherries and most of the cinnamon move to the beginning of the finish, where the cinnamon smolders with brown sugar and vanilla. The mint, leather and oak take over and just last forever.

The undiluted product is probably superior here, the death of the sweetness and the weird sharper turn of the citrus is unfortunate. It's not bad, its just not as good as it was.

Summary

So I'm conflicted on this product. It's very busy. There's a lot of flavors, and they don't all go together at the same time very well. It's permeated, smell and taste, by woodiness. It's also dreadfully expensive. This isn't a bourbon I would pay this kind of money to drink. I don't think this is what a sophisticated bourbon even tastes like. It's certainly what an old bourbon tastes like.

If I wanted a bourbon to sit and contemplate I would legitimately pick the Old Forester 1920 over this whiskey. That said, if you really like oak and leather and the more dry side of the bourbon flavors, this will hang out in your mouth with those flavors for a while. It's a bourbon reminiscent of Pappy Van Winkle 20+-year, and I don't really like it for all the same reasons.

Would I turn this whiskey down and say it's bad? No, but I wouldn't pay the asking price, and I wouldn't necessarily pick it to drink over quite a number of other more modest options. I have a personal scale for "expensive" bourbons, and they all have to stack up against Booker's.

Booker's is, by far, the best value bourbon on the market, in my opinion. You can readily find it for 55-60 dollars, it's cask strength, so you can dilute it heavily, and it tastes better than 90% of the stuff on the market. So if a whiskey costs more than 60 dollars, it has to be doing something better than Booker's. This whiskey does not do anything better than Booker's.