Weller Full Proof Barrel Pick – I’m An Expert Now.
By: The Gnarly Gnome
Photography By: The Gnarly Gnome
I’m out of my element.
It was screaming through my head the whole time… I love Bourbon, and lord knows that I’ve sipped away on some delicious stuff before – but I’m not a “Bourbon Guy” by any definition that I can come up with. Yet, here I was in a sprinter van bumping along the Kentucky roads leading to Buffalo Trace to somehow lend my opinion to a Weller Full Proof barrel pick.
I’m not very comfortable in social situations as it is, and when you push me outside of my comfort zone of craft beer… I freak out a little bit. It’s intimidating to be in a room with the likes of Molly Wellmann, Greg Hardmann, and a team of friends and employees of the Moerlein Lager House as they are choosing a bottle of bourbon to help kick off the opening of their new Bourbon Club at the brewery. You don’t want to screw something up.
However, a couple of deep breaths and a warm blast of the Kentucky sunshine can work wonders on insecurity. (As can a little bit of bourbon…)
Barrel Picking… Someone Has To Do It!
If you’re unfamiliar with what a barrel pick is… now that I’m a bit of an expert (I’m kidding if you missed that), I can help. A barrel of bourbon is 53 gallons. It holds a bunch of whiskey; sometimes, an individual (or, in our case, here), a bar, restaurant, or retailer will decide to purchase the entire barrel for themselves.
You head to the distillery, taste a few different barrels, and pick one that is then bottled up and delivered to you – ready to go.
This sounds pretty straightforward, but when you really start to pick apart several different whiskeys out of several different barrels, you start to realize how different they can be and how hard it is to pick ONE as a winner over the others.
It’s a barrel pick… and I was about to be put to the test with it. Before we could make the big decision, though – we headed on a pretty amazing tour of the distillery.
Freddie Johnson
I’m a sucker for a story, and if you’re going to tour Buffalo Trace, there isn’t a better storyteller to lead you through the place than Freddie Johnson. Freddie is a third-generation employee of the distillery, following his father and his grandfather. He’s been playing on the property since he was five years old and has built up quite a collection of stories over the years.
He led us through the distillery’s alleyways and catwalks, telling us about a company’s benchmark and the people’s importance to it. He told us how a tornado can shape how the oldest continually operating Bourbon distillery in the United States makes its product. He told us how keeping a promise to a dying relative can literally save your life.
If you want to fall in love with a company, a place, and the products that they are making, Freddie is the kind of guy who can help you achieve that goal. I could probably write an entire blog post just about how having folks like him on your staff can literally transform your business, but that’s probably for a different day.
What’s important to this story is that he can also walk you into a Bourbon Tasting and make you feel like you know what you’re doing.
Making The Decision
At the end of our incredible tour, we stepped into the tasting room, and in front of us were four barrels—some of them made from wood that literally grew in the same place and filled with whiskey that was made at the exact same time. Yet, each of the four barrels was vastly different.
Realizing how many factors can change the whiskey in a barrel from the moment it is filled until it hits my lips is mind-blowing. I’ve had single-barrel whiskey before, plenty of times. I don’t often get the chance to sit and sip away at several different versions of it simultaneously, though. It’s exciting, a ton of fun, and challenging at the same time.
We eliminated two of the barrels through a quick vote before Freddie sent us all into another room so he could mix up our tasting glasses and conduct a blind tasting of the other two barrels.
I had my clear favorite – the one on the left, but we were split. Out of the 8 of us, it was 4/4. Freddie broke the tie for us… and my pick was the winner. I think that means I did something right (or it means I’ve gone and screwed it all up.)
I helped pick a barrel… and now we wait.
The Long Wait For My Big Mouth
I have a lot of thoughts about this experience that I still need to share, and I will. Rest assured, once the bottles hit The Moerlein Lager House, you’ll be hearing from me again about this.
The entire experience has also made me think about Bourbon differently than I did before (in a very good way) – and you’ll probably have to hear more about that in the future, too.
I can’t thank the Moerlein Lager House team enough for bringing me along in this experience. It’s a little much to call life-changing, but that might be how I feel right now. It’s undoubtedly changing what’s been in my glass the last couple of weeks… I’m on a bit of a Bourbon kick right now – Buffalo Trace products only, of course. I’m a fan.
You can thank a bunch of people for that.
Note: I was invited on this trip by the Moerlein Lager House team… but they didn’t ask me to write anything, and hopefully it should be obvious to you that no money exchanged hands, I’d let you know if that was the case – this is NOT a sponsored post, I just wanted to share the experience with you!