Blind Vertical Tasting of Johnnie Walker

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Last year with the help of David T. Smith (Summer Fruit Cup) and Virginia Miller (The Perfect Spot) we arranged a blind vertical tasting of Johnnie Walker Whisky. A vertical tasting is typically when you drink several vintages  or expressions of the same wine, beer or whiskey. In our case we tasted 11 different bottlings of Johnnie Walker both from their core expressions as well as a couple of their more limited/less common expressions. We had Johnnie Walker Red Label, Red Label Export Blend (45.8% ABV), Explores' Club The Adventure, Black Label, Double Black, Green Label, Gold Label (pre-2013), Blue Label, Select Rye Cask Finish, Swing, and XR 21 Year Old. While Johnnie Walker has not been one of my favorite whiskies in the world I had strong opinions about a couple of them and I was excited to see if those beliefs held up when you strip away knowledge of price, age and bottle design.

The event's festivities were hosted by Virginia and her husband Dan, and while we had a good number of whiskies to taste, there were just five couples in attendance which made the event more intimate and relaxed. Now, while I suggested that we just bag the bottles and give them random markings like I'd done in my two previous blind tastings, David insisted that he would act as the steward for the evening and as usual he did an excellent job. David flighted the whiskies with the lighter character ones coming first and leading up to those with a heavier/smokier character at the end.

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David and and my wife Tia brought out one whisky at at time which gave us the opportunity to taste, take notes and give it a score from 1-10. As much as possible, we refrained from talking about the whiskies until everyone marked their score  so as not to unduly influence each other's perception of the spirit in the glass. For the most part I didn't have any idea which whisky was which except for the Select Rye Cask Finish and the Double Black which are so distinct that they stood out from the rest.

After David tallied all of the scores the clear favorite among the whole group was Johnnie Walker XR 21 Blended Scotch Whiskey. According to Diageo (owner of Johnnie Walker) the XR 21 was created to commemorate when Alexander Walker II was knighted by King George V. XR 21 happened to be served fifth in our tasting and when I looked back on my notes I was in the minority only giving it a 5 out of 10. I was also very curious to see how I and the other tasters rated the Blue Label. My opinion of this whisky has changed significantly over the years from ecstatic to meh. Not too surprisingly Blue Label came right around the middle of the pack which matched my score of 6 out of 10. Since I have Blue Label so infrequently I don't know if the quality has declined over the past decade as it's popularity and prestige has grown or that I have consumed a lot more high quality whisky. Blue Label is a nice whisky but for the price, I can't justify a re-purchase. Rounding out the bottom of the tasting were The Adventurer, Red Label Export Blend and Johnnie Walker Swing.

Going into the tasting I thought I would score Green and Gold near the top followed by Black, and Double Black. I also thought that I would score Red Label near the bottom however that wasn't exactly the case which is why I love blind tastings.

Here is how I ranked the 11 expressions of Johnnie Walker:

1. Select Rye Cask Finish Blended Scotch Whisky Aged 10 Years
   • The whisky picked up a lot of flavor for the Rye Cask and tastes sort of like a blend of American and Scotch Whisky.
2. Double Black Blended Scotch Whisky (No Age Statement)
   • Extra smokey and has a very full mouthfeel for a blended Scotch plus it's easy on the wallet. 
3. Red Label Blended Scotch Whisky (NAS)
   • This was big surprise for me, I really like the flavor of Red Label its got a medium body and best of all I can get it at K&L Wines on sale for $14!
4. Gold Label (pre-2013) 18 Year Old Blended Scotch Whisky
   • A nice blended Scotch with a medium body and unfortunately much better than the current Gold Label Reserve being sold.
5. Blue Label Blended Scotch Whisky (NAS)
   • Lots of character in this blend and significant oak character from the long maturation which is partially why I gave it a lower score and some people love it.
6. XR 21 Year Old Blended Scotch Whisky
   • This blend has well balanced flavors between the fruit, oak, sweet and dry but for me the finish dropped off quickly and didn't leave a lasting impression.
7. Green Label Blended Malt Scotch Whisky Aged 15 Years
   • Lots of malt and a good balance of smoke and fruitiness though I marked it down for having a thinner mouthfeel and more heat on the palate. Unlike most other expressions of Johnnie Walker, the Green Label is a Blended Malt which means it does not contain any aged grain whiskies.
8. Explorer's Club Collection - The Adventurer Blended Scotch Whisky (NAS)
   • Main flavors are malt and smoke though this blend is very thin with a short finish.
9. Black Label 12 Year Old Blended Scotch Whisky
   • I didn't find the flavors to be very complex and it had thin mouthfeel and a long hot finish.
10. Red Label Export Blended Scotch Whisky (NAS)
    • Had an odd menthol note in the nose, mouthfeel was thin and it had a lot of alcohol on the finish.
11. Swing Blended Scotch Whisky (NAS)
    • My summary for this blend is light, thin and sharp. One of the best features of this whisky is its bottle, which has a rounded bottom which allows it to gently rock back and forth on a boat without tipping over.

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Thank you to Virginia and Dan for hosting and supplying the Blue Label. Thanks also goes to David and Sara who supplied the XR 21 and Red Label Export Blend.

ADI's Judging of Craft Spirits Continues to Set a High Bar

In February, the American Distilling Institute will hold its 11th Annual Judging of Craft Spirits, making it one of the longest running and most respected spirit competitions in the United States. The mission of ADI's judging is to help promote the craft distillers, blenders, bitters makers and producers of aperitif & fortified wines that are making the finest quality artisan spirits and to give participating producers valuable, unbiased, third-party feedback on the quality and process of their products. To achieve this mission ADI has developed a set of industry leading protocols that govern how the spirits are handled and tasted, we select our judging staff from the top spirit experts in the world, and our awards are solely earned based on individual merit.

What most spirit competitions will not tell you is that it is impossible to eliminate all subjectivity from a judging performed by human beings. However, because ADI is committed to seeing that each spirit receives the most objective evaluation possible, we put a lot of thought into all aspects of the judging that might impact how a spirit is perceived. Once all of the spirits have been received they are sorted by spirit class (whiskey, gin, etc.) and category (bourbon, old tom gin, etc.). Once this sorting has been finished the spirits are then organized into flights by the stewards based on proof, maturation, or flavoring. Once the stewards finish flighting the spirits, our lead steward David T. Smith, creates a schedule so that flights of unaged or lighter spirits go out first before aged or strongly flavored spirits. This schedule is split into a morning session and an afternoon session. This allows us to give some stronger spirits to the judges before lunch after which, a meal and an hours break allows their palate to rest and reset for the afternoon session. We even arrange special meals for the judges' breakfasts and lunches that eliminate strong flavors such as garlic and peppers that might linger and obscure their full sense of smell and taste. All of this is done so that the judges are able to fully taste and evaluate each spirit as well as the one that comes after it.

When flights are sent out to a panel of judges they receive some basic class and category information such as, unaged rum between 80 and 86 proof, and a line of Glencairn copita glasses, each marked with a different number. Each panel consists of at least four judges and each panel is organized to include a variety of training and experience such as, distillers, wholesalers/retailers, bartenders/owners, consultants, and journalists. While other spirit competition sometimes draw judges from more limited backgrounds, ADI believes that having judges from different disciplines on each panel helps create a fuller perspective of each spirit. The judges nose and taste each spirit individually, write tasting notes, comments about what they like, what potentially could be improved, and a numerical score. Because we use judges like Nancy Fraley, Aaron Knoll, Martian Cate, and Hubert Germain-Robin who have the experience to identify specific production process that create both positive and negative flavors, they are able to give more meaningful feedback to the distilleries that entered. Then this process is repeated for each spirit in the flight. In this system each spirit is evaluated and scored on the basses of its own merit and not in comparison to the other spirits that happen to be next to it. Once the judges have finished a flight the panel has as discussion to decide if any medals should be awarded. Sometimes this means no spirit in a flight receive a medal and at other times more than one might earn a gold medal.

Flavien Desoblin of the Brandy Library

ADI's Judging is know for having some of the highest standards and historically it has awarded fewer medals than other competitions. Each spirit has to earn an award solely based on whats in the glass, not its name, not its price point, not where it comes from, just how good the product is. What this means is that those spirits which earn a medal from ADI are among of the best craft spirits in the  world. The American Distilling Institute is committed to helping small-scale, independently owned spirits producers improve their craft, grow and promote their products in a growing market. And because of this commitment, ADI's Judging of Craft Spirits will continue to be a leader in the industry, refine our processes to achieve our mission, and to find new ways to preach the gospel of craft spirits to all the world.

How to Make Homemade Nocino Part 3

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While making my own nocino has not been a difficult process it does take quite a bit of time to rest and mellow. In part 1 I described the process of extracting the walnut flavors and creating the base liqueur. In part 2 I created a variety of spice mixes and decanted the fledgling nocino into nine glass jars.

1. Clove, Cinnamon
2. Cinnamon, Star Anise
3. Cinnamon, Clove, Star Anise, Vanilla
4. Star Anise, Vanilla
5. Lemon, Cinnamon, Clove
6. Lemon, Cinnamon, Star Anise
7. Lemon, Cinnamon, Clove, Star Anise, Vanilla
8. Lemon, Star Anise, Vanilla
9. No added spices.

Most recipes I've seen suggest that after the spices have been added, to let the nocino rest for up to a year. So almost exactly one year later I decanted and filtered each jar using a V60 coffee setup. For some silly reason I shook the first jar which stirred up a bunch of fine sediment and took forever to filter. With each successive jar I was careful not disturb the sediment which made the filtering step so much quicker. As I filtered each jar of nocino I cleaned the jars so that I could reuse them. 

At the time I was doing this my wife and I had a 1 year old boy and I didn't have a lot of time to spend with the nocino so after each jar was filtered I put the contents back into its now clean jar and sealed it back up. My intent was revisit them the next week and see which spice mix I liked best. However, time has a way of slipping away from you when you have a baby so I didn't come back to retaste the nocino until more than a year after I filtered them.

Tasting through each jar was very informative and a little disappointing. Except for the nocino that didn't have any spices added to it, none were good enough on their own to keep separate. In each one, the intensity of the spices was out of balance with the walnuts, sugar and alcohol. But, rather than throw them out I decided to blend some of them together and see if I could make the sum of the parts better than the whole. However, even after blending some of the jars together the results were less than stellar because I left the added spices to macerate for way too long.  At this point the only hope I have of saving the nocio is by adding some mint to it and trying to transform it into a fernet which might work better with its current intensity of the spices. 

Conclusions:

When I tasted the different jars of nocino there were a few things that were immediately obvious.

1. The nut flavor and mouthfeel of the nocino made by desiccating the green walnuts with raw sugar before I added the alcohol was by far superior to macerating the green walnuts with alcohol and simple syrup.
2. Macerating the lemon with the green walnuts, alcohol and simple syrup was way to long and it left a not so pleasant and bitter  lemon flavor from the zest.
3. Even though I tried to put small quantities of spices in each jar, I included way too much. while there are some that I like more than others, in the future I will need to use less spices per unit volume and it would probably be best.
4. Macerating the spices for 12 months is too long. The nocino does need to rest for 12 months but it would be better to taste the nocino in week long intervals to see how the extraction progresses.
5. Time is your friend when making amazing nocino. When I tasted the 2 year old jar of nocino that I had filled without spices it was fantastic. After a year the tannins were still pretty strong, but after two years it has a good balance between bitter and sweet. It had a very nice, nose of light coco powder, and cedar...

In the end this was a fantastic project and even though I wasn't supper excited by any of the spices versions, I learned some excellent lessons that will make my next batch of nocino even better. 

Read Part 1                              Read Part 2

One Simple Way to Keep Your Vermouth Fresh

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Vermouth is an aromatized  and fortified wine which can be drunk neat, on the rocks with a twist or in a cocktail. Aromatize refers to the fact that herbs and botanicals are added to the wine to enhance its flavor, aroma and color; fortified refers to the fact that neutral spirit, usually from grape brandy is added to increase the alcohol content which makes the vermouth more stable and last longer. However, since vermouth is based on wine, an open bottle has a shorter lifespan than say an open bottle of whiskey.

In the last few years I have grown to appreciate quite a few cocktails that call for vermouth and so I have bought a bottle from time to time. However, since I usually drink spirits neat, I've run into the problem that my open bottle of vermouth goes off before I've used it up. Because I hate to be wasteful, I've mostly given up on buying vermouth.

In the lead up to 2016 Negroni Week I wanted to buy some vermouth to make my negronis and I didn't want it to bad after the week was over and I was done making cocktails for a while. That's when it hit me. I came up with the idea to buy four 250ml swing-top bottles from The Container Store, decant the vermouth into the smaller bottles and put them into the refrigerator. I used the first 250mls during the week making cocktails and the remaining bottles sat in the back of my refrigerator. Now, four months into this experiment I am happy to say that when I opened another small bottle, the vermouth was still fresh. Both the cold refrigerator and having little to no headspace in the smaller bottled worked together to extend the life of the vermouth that otherwise would have gone bad in that amount of time. 

I figured that every time I pour vermouth from a regular bottle some amount of oxygen gets mixed into the liquid that remains. Each time you do that, the more the vermouth sloshes around and the more oxygen gets into it. Now, if I drank vermouth or made cocktails more often this would be a problem. However, this simple and inexpensive trick of decanting full size vermouth bottles (which are less expensive per ounce) into smaller bottles has made it possible for me keep vermouth on hand at all times, waiting for me when a cocktail mood strikes. If you are like me and it has killed you to pour out bad vermouth because you were too slow to finish the bottle, give this little trick a shot.

Blind Tasting Bourbon Less Than $50

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A while ago I organized a blind tasting of bourbons that cost less than $50. I was inspired to put this together after a small group of friends and I did a blind tasting of whiskeys under $20. That tasting was both a lot of fun and introduced me to a couple of bourbons that I really love. Wanting to repeat this process I put together a game plan. First, I wanted to focus the tasting only on bourbons between $20 and $50. I picked this price point for two reasons: one, my expectation was the overall quality would be a little higher than the under $20 bracket; and two, because it falls in the range that I and many of my friends would feel comfortable spending on a bottle to drink at home from time to time without feeling like its so expensive or exceptional we'd have to save it for some sort of special occasion. Second,  I only wanted bourbons that I knew were sold by the distillery i.e. no Non-Distiller Producer bourbons like Bulleit or Black Maple Hill. Third, I didn't want any single barrel products because by nature their flavor profile can change from barrel to barrel and I wanted to help people find a bourbon that they would like and be able to return to and have it taste the same as it was at the party.  With these criteria in mind I went about finding bourbons that fit.

I found over dozen bourbons that matched my criteria however, 12 samples of bourbons even at 1/4 oz each starts to add up. I wanted to be sure that people could get home safely so I limited the field to nine. As I spread the word among my friends I was able to find about 25 people who committed to coming and who were willing to chip in to cover the costs of the whiskey.

Now, because I also wanted to participate in the tasting, the trick was figuring out how to set things up so the tasting was blind for me as well. The solution I settled on was I would mark nine brown paper lunch bags with the planetary symbols, Mars ♂, Venus ♀ etc. and then my wife bagged the bottles. For a couple of the bottles that were more easy to identify we decanted the bourbon into clean wine bottles.

The tasting was hosted at a friend's house and I placed three bottles of bourbon in the kitchen, the living room and a spare bedroom. The reason for this was that it forced people to move around and not just all congregate in one room of the house. I wasn't concerned about the order in which people tasted the bourbons so it worked fine. In a more formal tasting, flight order is important but for our purposes it was an easy sacrifice.

After a few hours or tasting and eating snacks, I collected the score sheets that I handed out the to tasters. They rated each bourbon from 1-10 based on what they liked. When I tallied the results, one of the first things that stood out was there were no bad bourbons in the batch.  While people liked some bourbons more than others there were no clear winners or losers. In the tasting under $20 it was very obvious that there were a couple of whiskeys that everyone liked and a couple that everyone didn't like, but not this time. This was an encouraging result because what it said to me was if you are going to buy a bourbon in the $20-$50 price range, you can be sure that it is a quality product though you can't guarantee the it will be your favorite.

After tallying the scores here were the results from our group of tasters:

1. Russel's Reserve 10 Year Old 90 Proof (45% ABV) Distilled by the Wild Turkey Distillery in Lawrenceburg, KY.

2. Henry DuYore's Straight Bourbon 91.3 Proof (45.65% ABV) Distilled by Ransom Spirits in Sheridan, OR. (This was the only craft bourbon and the only bourbon not from Kentucky in the tasting.)

3. John E. Fitzgerald Larceny 92 Proof (46% ABV) Distilled at the Bernheim distillery in Louisville, KY and owned by Heaven Hill.

4. Colonel E.H. Taylor Small Batch Bottled in Bond 100 Proof (50% ABV) Distilled at the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, KY.

5. Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select, 90.4 Proof (45.2% ABV) Distilled at the Woodford Reserve Distillery in Versailles, KY and owned by Brown-Forman.

6. Elijah Craig 12 Year Old 94 Proof (47% ABV) Distilled at the Bernheim distillery in Louisville, KY and owned by Heaven Hill.

7. Four Roses Small Batch 90 Proof (45% ABV) Distilled at Four Roses in Lawrenceburg, KY.

8. Basil Hayden 80 Proof (40% ABV) Distilled at Jim Beam's Clermont and Frankfort distilleries in KY.

9. Maker's 46 94 Proof (47% ABV) Distilled at the Maker's Mark Distillery in Loretto, KY.

From my personal score sheet my highest rating went to Colonel Taylor which was something I had never tried before and I was happy to find a new bourbon  that I really enjoyed. The other interesting thing was I gave my lowest rating to Maker's 46 which didn't surprise me since I'm not a huge fan of Makers Mark. It was reassuring to see that my taste buds are pretty reliable both when I know what I'm drinking and when I tasting things blind. In the end, this was a really fun event to organize and it was a blast getting a house full of people drinking and discovering some really good bourbon.