For this installment of Tasting Tales, we bring to you Corsair Distillery’s Triple Smoke. This expression is a great way to get into smoked whiskeys, especially if you’re scared of those peaty scotches out there.
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Tasting Tales: Corsair Dark Rye
After doing some of my typical Internet hunting I bring back to my whiskey tribe a beast of an article. Tom Eblen, from the Lexington Herald-Ledger, writes about cracking open his Old Barbee Whiskey and sharing it with longtime Wild Turkey master distiller Jimmy Russell. As it turns out, the bourbon came from the author, whose wife’s great-grandfather Herman Volkerding was president of the now long-gone Kentucky distillery that made it.
If you find Mr. Eblen’s article a great read then you will enjoy viewing my unopened Old Barbee Whiskey with the original box in the slideshow below. Notice the differences in the label when compared to the bottle pictured from the original article. Will I be opening mine and tasting it? Only if I find another one.
Read more here: Tom Eblen: Distilled in 1901, Old Barbee bourbon still smooth
Have you ever wondered what a bottle of medicinal whiskey distilled nearly 100 years ago tastes like? Yeah, I’m sure you’re thinking what most people think. Ewww! Hasn’t that stuff turned by now? Well, in most cases, the answer is no. If the seal is intact, no sediment at the bottom, and only a bit of evaporation, you may be in for a treat. Unlike wine, when whiskey is bottled after aging for let’s say, 8 years, it remains an 8 year old whiskey for life if it has been stored in a cool dark place.
You don’t have to drink medicinal whiskey because LAW has done it for you
If you’re like me, you wouldn’t dare drink one unless you had a spare or two lying around and that usually isn’t the case. You see, I’m a collector and once the bottles are opened, they have zero value to me. So, rather than open that delicious looking bottle of Old Farm you found behind the walls while renovating, drop me a line so I can talk you out of it.
Our friends at the LA Whiskey Society have done us a favor and tasted some of the oldest and most interesting prohibition era medicinal whiskies you can find. While a few were stinkers, several charmed the palates off of the LAW tasters, which worries me they will pursue drinking more of them. Since I’m not going to open bottles in my collection, I’m happy that the tasters at LAW have done this so we don’t have to. For an incredibly interesting read, see the main article. For tasting notes, see the links below. Dates are distillation and bottling, respectively.
- Old Fitzgerald 1916/1933
- Fairlawn distilled 1916 (this label is awesome)
- Colonel Tyson’s 1916/1923
- Echo Spring, Distilled 1917, 16 Years Old
- Old Hermitage 1916/1926
- Silver Grove Bourbon 1917/1933
- Silver Wedding 1917/1932
- Golden Wedding 1917/1931
- Country Gentleman 1917/1932
- Dougherty’s Private Stock Rye 1912/1929
- Shenandoah Rye 1912/1927
- John Gibson’s & Son Ancient Special Reserve Rye 1917/1933