As I get older, I occasionally find myself getting nostalgic for days gone by. Sometimes it is for when I was a kid in the early 80s, playing my friend’s Atari 2600. (I mean, Pitfall was awesome and I’d go visit him just to play it.) Sometimes it is for when I was newly married in the late 90s and my kid was young. This past weekend though the nostalgia hit a little closer to the current day. I was in the liquor store picking up a couple of bottles of cocktail whiskey when I noticed a bottle of Michter’s Rye sitting there.
Now when I was first getting into whiskey, Michter’s was one of my go-to Ryes. I was fascinated by the burgeoning craft distilling movement and found their story interesting. Of course, it was just a story. It was a complete fabrication. Instead of being the “oldest distillery in America” or whatever they were claiming back then, they didn’t even have a distillery and had instead appropriated the history of an abandoned trademark. And that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not literally, of course, I still liked their product but I just didn’t want to support it anymore. So yeah, I was nostalgic about when I was naive enough to believe the marketing. Whiskey felt romantic back then.
So I was standing in the store, feeling nostalgic, and decided to go ahead and grab that bottle of Michter’s Rye to use in cocktails for old time’s sake. I mean they have a functioning distillery now and have been distilling for themselves for a few years. And it is pretty silly to hold a grudge for a decade when all they did is tell a fanciful story. I mean Heaven Hill somehow gets away with telling people that Evan Williams was Kentucky’s first distiller and that Elijah Craig both somehow invented charring barrels in a fire that only burned the inside of the barrel and I never gave them too much grief about it.
Plus, maybe I’d been missing out on something all these years. I mean it was my go-to for a reason, right?
Michter's US-1 Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey
Purchase Info: $39.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Total Wine, Roseville, MN
Price per Drink (50mL): $2.67
Details: 42.4% ABV. Single Barrel #: 21A227
Nose: Wintergreen, cooked oatmeal, caramel.
Mouth: Thin mouthfeel. Spicy with cinnamon, wintergreen, and caramel.
Finish: Medium length and warmth. Lingering mint, cinnamon, caramel.
Thoughts: This is... fine. It's ok neat, but nothing to write home about. It’s a good thing that I originally bought it as a cocktail rye because cocktails are where I will probably use most of it. As a cocktail rye, I like it. As a sipping rye, it gets a meh. It turns out, I wasn’t missing that much all these years. My palate has become more sophisticated along with my ability to sniff out crazy marketing stories, I guess.
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