Among many things that I set to the side during Tiki Month here at the Pegu Blog was bottle of Bulleit Bourbon that the distiller kindly sent me for review. For a variety of reasons, I wanted to make a review of this outstanding liquor my first post-Tiki post.
Bulleit is a premium small-batch bourbon. The original Bulleit, Augustus, worked up his unique style of bourbon in the 1830s, and his secret disappeared, along with Augustus himself, on an ill-fated trip to New Orleans to sell his brew. While his actual fate is unknown, I’m guessing he was a bit ahead of his time and suggested to the locals that his stuff would make a better Sazerac, leading to violent defenestration. At any rate, descendant Tom Bulleit researched the methods and ideas of Augustus and has come up with the modern Bulleit process, proving once again boys and girls that lawyers can make a positive contribution to society, if only they just stop lawyerin’!
Now, I don’t drink bourbon neat. But I do taste new ones that way to figure out what to do with them. Whiskeys are very complex liquors, and if you leap right into a Manhattan with a new one, you’ll learn nothing beyond “good”, or “um”, or even “eww”. So I poured a few fingers into a glass, dropped in a couple of tiny ice cubes, and took a sip. At that moment, I found myself with something different on my hands. This stuff is good. Every bit as good as most of the single malts I keep around for sipping.
And Bulleit drinks more like a single malt than any bourbon I’ve tried before. First off, the various flavors are more in balance than is usually the case with a bourbon. In particular, the sweetness elements are toned down here, with a smokier undertone coming out in response. Bulleit uses a of of rye in its mix, and you can certainly tell. Perhaps if anyone still cared about the once white-hot debate over rye versus bourbon in Mint Juleps, Bulleit would be the product to bring peace in our time.
It is important to note that this is still definitely a bourbon, not a scotch. There are no peaty flavors here, and while the sweetness has been put in a more respectful place, it is still quite evident.
I may have mentioned before that I have a terrible sense of smell. If I saw like I smell, I’d be legally blind, so I don’t usually pay much attention to the aroma of liquors. But there must be some powerfully good aromas associated with Bulleit. I say this because I have a raging cold right now, and last night I tried the Bulleit one more time to make a few additional notes, and it was not nearly so good to me. It was flatter. If you have a nose that works like a normal person’s, I can only imagine how much you’d like this whiskey.
Several nights ago, I was down at Details, my new favorite cocktail bar in Columbus, and upon looking at the menu saw Bulleit as one of the options head barman Chris Dillman offers for his Old Fashioneds. Interestingly, it was the cheapest of the bunch. This surprised me greatly, so l later went and checked the Ohio liquor price list and was shocked at how reasonably priced Bulleit is! As I said, my first bottle of Bulleit (it won’t be my last) was a review sample, so I didn’t know. Blanton’s is about 44 bucks here. Booker’s is about 53. Bulleit is 25. Twenty-five.
My mind immediately leapt to Sobieski vodka. As I’ve written about that liquor, it is cause for excitement when you come across a genuinely top-notch product that is priced well below its peers. Especially in these times, where unless you have or a planning of getting a guvmint job, you need to count your pennies.
I only hope this doesn’t become a problem for the brand. I continue to think that the low price is a drag on Sobieski’s growth in the market. But it is a vodka. While the difference between it and its top-priced peers is negligible, the difference between it and its same-priced competitors is only slightly greater. Bulleit is a bourbon. Whisk(e)ys are unique critters, with huge ranges in style and quality between each brand. Pricing itself right next to Makers or Jim Beam is a bad idea. In fact, I asked Chris about this (right after he gave me the tragic but unsurprising news that he was out of Bulleit), and he said he had heard that they are considering moving the price up to a better neighborhood.
Not that I’m requesting a price increase! The world needs more great booze at good prices. I’m just saying I don’t expect this one to stay this cheap forever. So if you like bourbon, or even if you are a single malt guy, go out and give Bulleit a try while it’s still so unreasonably reasonable.

UPDATE: Welcome readers of Screwtop Winebottle! While you are here, why not take a look at a few of my other liquor reviews, or just some more generalized tomfoolery?

Among the great classic liqueurs that I have never really gotten around to playing with, the most famous and mainstream is Benedictine, along with its pre-blended cousin, B&B. Benedictine was created by Benedictine monks in France during the Renaissance, and its ingredients must have seemed like a liquid map of the world to the people of that age. The monks made Benedictine until the revolution, when the French, in their zeal to conflate democracy with killing anyone who disagreed with the mob, caused the monks to abandon their abbey at Fecamp. At that point, the recipe was lost for almost 70 years, before a copy was found in an attic. (Perhaps the guy was looking for stuff to sell on eBay) It has been a commercial success ever since.

The D.O.M. stands for Deo Optimo Maximo which roughly means, to God, the most good, the most great.
Over Christmas, I received a bottle of B&B to review, and that gave me the kick in the pants I needed to go out and buy a bottle of Benedictine, so I could try them both.
I started off with the Benedictine because, well, I’m a simple kind of guy and it made simple sense to me to try to understand the pure stuff first. This liqueur is a highly organized riot of flavors from citrus to spicy to a little savory. The flavorants include nutmeg and vanilla, cinnamon and cardamon, and even Myrrh, which I’ve been running into a lot lately. Benedictine says that there are 27 separate ingredients, and they probably store the secret recipe in the same vault guarded by a three-headed dog as Coke does. The website has a cool little trivia game for foodies, where you have to put some of the major spices onto their place of origin on a map of the world. (Go to the site and click on the discovery tab)
I went browsing through some recipes to see how I could deploy this drinkable perfume, and settled on the Frisco. There are two versions, and I started with the Rye variant:

The resulting cocktail is a bit cloudy and yellow. It tastes very tart and not bad at all, for those of us who like our cocktails that way. But the Benedictine is very much a background player in this drink, and I couldn’t tell much about what exactly it was bringing to the party. Its presence is apparent, but this is not a great drink for me to evaluate Benedictine. I next tried the Bourbon version:

This cocktail is clear and much prettier. You can easily identify what the Benedictine is bringing to the party here, and drinking this version is where I got the idea to call it a highly organized riot. There is a lot of different stuff to savor, going in a lot of different directions, but the cool thing is, they don’t get in each other’s way at all. Unfortunately, this version is too sweet for me.
It was clear by this point that there’s a good reason why Benedictine’s been made forever. I am relatively easily confused by too many competing flavors, and that wasn’t happening here. This is, I suspect, why this liqueur is so accessible to so many drinkers. But is was also clear that a sour guy like myself was going to need another route make it work for me. I turned to Gary Regan’s recipe using B&B that I read on Intoxicologist:

Now we were getting somewhere! This cocktail is a delicious blend of flavors, with the floral Sapphire and even more floral St. Germaine really bringing out the Benedictine in the B&B. And this is not a sweet drink, it’s smooth and dry.
But I still was not satisfied. The flavors I was finding best in the B&B were the spices, as opposed to the florals. I reasoned that since both the B&B and the Sapphire are a mix of floral and spice, the floral St. Germaine was tipping the balance against where I really wanted to go. So I backed it out and replaced it with some more spice:

Bingo. This one definitely works well for me. The Canton tilts the balance toward the spicy side, but doesn’t unbalance the Benedictine’s broad spectrum of flavors. This isn’t a casual sipping drink, though. Try one when you feel like paying attention.

Jealousy, thy name is me.
Dr. Bamboo is one of my favorite blogs. I’d read it regularly for its writing alone. I especially like cocktail bloggers who go through their process of concocting and refining a, usually new, drink, and the good doctor does this very well.
He doesn’t post often enough, but there is a good reason for that. In fact that reason is why I think he stands out from the crowd and why I’m posting this little babblment. Doctor Bamboo is one heck of an illustrator. He includes at least one original drawing with each post, and they are all fabulous. You should read him. Always.
Who am I kidding? I’m not writing this to send you to his blog. I’m writing this so I can feel good about stealing one of his illustrations and posting it here on my blog, thereby giving some classy visual interest to this shabby, rundown joint. Here’s the picture from his latest post:

Looks cool all on its own, doesn’t it? Now, if you want to make sense of why a Kentucky Colonel’s secret identity is Bobsled Man, go read his blog and find out!