Given as a Christmas gift, it’s always enjoyable to try out a new single malt that you’ve simply never had before. What we get is something that clearly has some faults, but brings such a nice warm and well-spiced flavor that placed in a glass neat makes this a damn fine gift.
Imperial isn’t exactly the best word to use in this situation being such a common term for high proof beer. Add that to the vague branding and Sazerac being explicit and this is essentially just some off-brand scotch. This is the moment we’d love dearly to tell you it’s akin to an Ezra Brooks story, but it’s not. This isn’t good.
This was brought up in the latest episode of Whiskeypedia (a podcast about drinking whiskey and Wikipedia), and as mentioned there – we buy entirely random, and often to our own detriment. This whiskey irks us especially being a slight contradiction and also because it doesn’t even mix well.
We move this week from a scotch that is much better neat to an Irish whiskey that is much better neat, with the week prior to that being an American single malt better neat… (everything is the same kids). In all seriousness though, this is technically a fantastic whiskey.
This does have one of the dreaded ‘kickstart’ pour spouts that have accumulated only ire on this fair website. We got around that with some clippers, but even the results are not terribly pretty. In all, fuck you. Now let’s get to the whiskey itself.
Let’s just get this out of the way, the current interpretation of patriotism and nationalism is in a weird place in America right now, and given this it’s kind of hard to try and be objective about this in a meaningful way, but we’ve stated before that the reason we break down our scores is that we care more about what’s in the bottle than everything else so – eh? (It is actually pretty good)
Yes, that is Zack with a k, not an h. Now we bought this because Chelmsford, MA is unique, and because we are still staunch fans of the Ezra Brooks – as what looks like a knockoff is 10 times the original. However, we have to contend with the other side of the spectrum and whether this is really more like an Evan Williams.
Knob Creek has been a common sight in stores and bars, but it’s never graced our site – until now. The verdict? Well, it’s another whiskey suffering from the 100 proof count, and the sweet bourbon flavors does little to help. We do personally know the rye as an okay Old Fashioned, but we’re in bourbon county now.
There is a rule of design where you put the most valuable information closer to the top-left as most people look there first (obviously our Arabic or Japanese readers would disagree among others). As such we too could not ignore the elephant that is is apparently the official spirit for golf, the King’s Game, or as we call it – a good walk spoiled. (One of our reviewers does occasionally golf, but we’re not sorry)
We wanted to post this at the end of the final season, but given how badly that went down we decided to let heads cool. (Get it?) The reason being that we actually want to recommend this to you dear readers, and it’s hard to do that with the amount of vitriol that was swirling around.
