Rock Town Single Barrel Bourbon

@Victor thank you for insight on a distillery I've never heard of. You really get to try some interesting expressions.

@Frost, last I checked there were still something like a dozen new distilleries being opened each month in the USA. Maybe something like a third of those plan to make whiskey as one of their products at some time. I don't even try to sample them all. Their whiskey products are almost always three to five times as expensive as a large efficient legacy producer, so they are almost always pricey. Fortunately my sister buys a lot of bottles from these new guys after she samples them at stores, and so I get to taste them at my leisure. For the moment these hundreds of small US distilleries are moving forward, but I think that there has to be a shake-out for a lot of them at some point. In order to sell very young whiskey, they almost always use a heavy degree of barrel char to get the most from the new oak in a short amount of time. You do taste that heavy char. Often it dominates the taste of the whiskey, which, for me, is not a desirable thing.

Can we say: heavy char, the bane of the young American whiskey? Used to cover up a young dram.

@Frost, yes, I do think that heavy char is the bane of young American whiskey. Not all of them overdo the char, but many of them do. While I don't feel that there is usually anything wrong with the grain flavours of young American whiskeys, I do strongly feel that the effort to bring adequate wood flavours into the whiskey by the use of heavy char usually adds too much bitter char flavour in the resulting product. They do succeed in getting a lot of wood flavours using the heavy char, but they get too much char, too. I don't like tasting a lot of bitter char in my bourbon. It is distracting and it messes up the balance of flavours.

Interestingly, Jim Murray named Rock Town Distillers the 2015 US Microdistiller of the Year. Looking through his reviews, they all appear to be for rye bourbons. I suppose that this barrel # 271 reviewed here is one of their early efforts at wheated bourbon. I would say that heavy char is more forgiving with rye grain than it is with wheat.

If you get wheated bourbon right, the world will beat a path to your door, a la Pappy Van Winkle or William Larue Weller. I admire Rock Town for putting out barrel strength whiskeys. I would not be surprised to find future bottles of theirs very much to my liking.

Victor, it was quite by accident that I came across your review for Rock Town Single Barrel Bourbon. I was just finishing my bottle of Barrel 375 (Bottle 75 of 94), bottled at 56.72% and was very interested in your review Your whisky/whiskey knowledge simply astounds me. My experience with Barrel 375 was far more pleasurable than yours. I found Barrel 375 to be full of light syrup, corn, licorice and light as a feather on the palate. Spices buzzed nicely along and there was no bitterness from the barrel. The label states that the whiskey distilled from "Arkansas grown corn, Arkansas grown wheat and malted barley." That jumped out at me. If this was indeed a mash bill and not just some marketing text, was barley used as a substitute for rye? (as you noted, Rock Town has a history of making rye influenced bourbons). Also in your response to my review of Cu Bocan recently, you gave an excellent discussion on charred vs. toasted cooperage, and stated that corn and barley don't react to char as well as to toasted wood. This whiskey was "aged 21 months in new charred oak barrels." As I mentioned, there was absolutely no tannin bitterness. Do you think that the quality of the distillate and the Arkansas summers can mitigate the negative influence of bitterness caused by char? On a side note, I visited the distillery two years ago with my brother in law and did some tastings. There was no one available who could answer any detailed questions, but the attendant did give us more than the usual amount of samplings. They are doing some inventive things such as distilling a sorghum whiskey and experimenting with peated barley. Our sampling was limited to various bourbons and ryes (the ryes were uniformly excellent). If you do come across another Rock Town bottling, I think that you might want to give it another try. Thanks again for all you do for this site.

@jerryclyde I always enjoy your postings, no doubt partially because you often see things similarly to the ways that I do.

I'd love to: 1) try your bottle, 2) re-sample the one I reviewed, owned by my sister, and 3) see what yet other bottles would demonstrate. All assessments are subject to revision based on additional experiences.

If the char is heavy, I don't see it as being significantly mellowed out by any measure that I can think of.

Thanks for joining in, and thank you very much for your kind words!