Category: Spirits

The folks at Jack Daniel’s may be best known for their black labeled Old No. 7 whiskey, but these days the brand is branching out and trying new things. One of those newer releases is a single barrel bottling (at barrel strength, no less!) of their famous whiskey.

“An experience you can spend the rest of your life with, it’s that good.” That’s the tag line that’s used for Hayes Parker Reserve Bourbon. Which is a pretty damn high bar for a whiskey that I’d never seen or heard of in my life. Which is exactly why I brought one of their reasonably priced bottles home to give it a try.

I’m pretty lucky that I’ve got a good supply of whiskey in the house, a collection that I acquired over the course of years that will keep me in business for a good while. But eventually even my extended supply is going to run out, leaving me stuck at home and without a stiff drink. Happily for me (and for all off you!), there are options available.

There are some things that grab my attention and make me want to check out a bottle of whiskey I’ve heard about. Sometimes it’s an interesting background. Sometimes there’s a distillation process that I find intriguing. In this case, it was something on the bottle itself. Benchmark claimed that this was the benchmark against which all other whiskey is judged. With a bold claim like that, I knew I needed to put it to the test.

I grew up in New York, and while most equate “New York” with “New York City”, there are actually a great deal of distinct areas within the state. My hometown in Westchester County is vastly different from my wife’s experience in Orange County only 60 miles apart. And that’s not even getting into regions like Syracuse, the Finger Lakes, Adirondacks, etc. Each area has unique qualities, and today we’re looking at a product from a Long Island distillery that tries to capture some of the local culture in a bottle.

I spend a good amount of time in the Hudson Valley, NY area. My wife was raised there and has friends that still live in the area that she regularly visits. While I’m being dragged on visits, I like to sample the local offerings and one item that piqued my interest was a small batch bourbon that comes from a distillery in downtown Beacon, New York.

I love walking down the whiskey aisle and grabbing new things off the shelf. I never know what I’m going to find, and in this case I had no idea that I was about to go trawling through FBI case files and legal rulings to figure out what the heck was going on with this one, seemingly innocent bottle.

The first time I heard about Mitcher’s was from Billions, the TV show. Apparently Mitcher’s sponsors the show, and as a result the cast gets a fresh bottle in their dressing room at the beginning of filming for the season. I’d seen it on the shelves before, but this new trivia was enough to pique my curiosity and actually pick up a bottle to try for myself.

There are more and more distilleries popping up in Texas, and especially in my local Austin area. One distillery that I hadn’t heard of before is Banner Distilling Co, and they recently started distributing their first aged spirit, the Banner Wheat Whiskey.