OVERVIEW from KENNY - March 3rd, 2021
Barrel Details - 11yr. 74% corn, 21% rye. 5% malted barley, Yeast Strain #1
Barrel ID: 2-E1-0121
We all met up for BBQ and then headed over to Bulleit to begin the tour and process. Right now, Bulleit is closed for visitors so the place was a ghost town and we had it all to ourselves. We assembled everyone at the visitor center and walked over to the bus that takes us to the distillery for the tour. To set the context, this bus is a hybrid and is mostly propane-powered. When Melissa started the bus, you would have thought it was a Mustang GT500 revving up. That certainly wasn't normal. We drove the bus for about 100 yards and she said something wasn't right. So we went out, hopped on the second bus, and the same thing happened. In an effort to not slow things down, we opted to begin tasting and hoped the bus situation would figure itself out. Fast forward, we never got to go on the tour but I received an email from Melissa the next day and she found out that someone had stolen the catalytic converters off both busses! That was a first.
We went down to the tasting room and we had samples 1 through 4 available for us. When we got to sample #4, I got the taste and smell of Red Bull. It's not often I pull a note out like that. Folks ended up finding the same note when they got to #4. We then proceeded to keep going and sampled 9 different barrels. When we got to #5, the entire table looked around and said "Yep, we're going to go ahead and take this one". It was a clear winner.
Every barrel was 11 years old. We had 2 different mashbills, and (IIRC) only 1 yeast strain for all of them. There was a lot of consistency between the 9 barrels which made it even harder to eliminate some. We eliminated some based on finish or a small flavor nuance. We ended up taking 3 barrels and all of them share some flavor characteristics. We really couldn't choose a bad barrel on this day.
Afterward, we were talking about sticker themes and the Red Bull idea came up. Even though we didn't select the barrel that had notes of Red Bull, we thought it would be fun to create our OWN fake energy drink labels for these three.
Enjoy.
