It’s March again. And around here, March means brackets. Not those silly basketball or hockey ones, but Bourbon ones. Which means that last weekend, I needed to get my butt out of the house and go buy a whole mess of bourbon. Now, most of those have nothing to do with tonight.
I mean, I haven’t even started looking at the bracket bourbons yet. That will start this weekend.
But you don’t expect me to go on a cross-Metro shopping trip to four different liquor stores without picking up a few extra things, do you? Yeah, luckily, my wife didn’t either. Because I did find a few goodies that will pop up both before and after the upcoming Madness. The first of which is the bottle of Copper & Cask Toasted Barrel Finish shown above.
Copper & Cask is a Non-distiller producer (NDP) of sourced bourbon. I like two things about them. The first is that they are very transparent about the fact that they didn’t make what’s in the bottle. The second is that they actually tell you who did. As a big fan of transparency, I love that. Most of their whiskey is sold as single barrel store picks so unless you are buying a bunch, every time you see a bottle it will be different juice inside it. This is one of the reasons I bought a case of one that I particularly loved a couple of years ago.
As far as I can tell, only one store chain sells Copper & Cask in the Twin Cities, and that is Top Ten Liquors. That said, I haven’t been to every liquor store in the country, so you will need to do that legwork on your own. They do sell limited quantities on the Copper & Cask website from time to time, though.
The last time we looked at this, I was looking at both an MGP 95% rye whiskey and an MGP 21% rye bourbon. Tonight’s bourbon is the same 21% rye MGP mashbill, but this one has been finished in toasted barrels as well. Let’s see how it tastes.
Copper & Cask Singel Barrel Bourbon, Toasted Cask Finish: Top Ten Liquors Selection
Purchase Info: $59.96 for a 750 mL bottle at Top Ten Liquors, Chanhassen, MN
Price per Drink (50 mL): $4.00
Details: 59.5% ABV. Barreled: July 2016. Bottled: Sept 2023. 7 years old. Distilled in: Lawrenceburg, IN. Mashbill: 75% corn, 21% rye, 4% malted barley.
Nose: Cinnamon, nutmeg, caramel, and oak.
Mouth: Spicy cinnamon, caramel, almond, citrus zest, and tobacco.
Finish: Warm and long with notes of cinnamon, oak, citrus zest, and mint.
Thoughts: This is delicious, which I sort of expected. Seriously, I've never had a bad bottle from this brand. If the chain of stores that regularly carries it here in the Twin Cities had a store closer to me than 30 minutes away, I'd consistently have at least one bottle on hand. And this toasted barrel-finish version is no exception. It's deliciously spicy with strong cinnamon and nutmeg notes throughout. Big fan. Not so big that I’ll be buying a case for the whiskey closet, but still a big, big fan.
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