What Does John Know?

I first mentioned this in my blog back on May 21st. It is now official. Buffalo Trace has bottled a rum as part of their “Experimental Collection” releases.

The rum is 17 years old and is a marriage of rum from two different barrels–a new barrel and an used barrel. The yield is less than 300 bottles. Price is the same as others in the Experimental Collection, with an SRP just shy of $50 for the 375ml bottle.

I tasted samples from both barrels back when I visited Buffalo Trace in December. If married properly, this could be a very delicious rum. I am looking forward to trying it.

When I was at the distillery in December, we tasted our way through many whiskey samples. Two samples that I tasted were pretty bad whiskeys. That’s because they weren’t whiskeys. They were rum samples.

According to Mark Brown, Buffalo Trace’s President and CEO, they have created a meritage of the two casks and plan to release the rum in July, as part of their Experimental Collection. As far as I know, this is just a one-off and won’t be repeated anytime in the near future.

The guys at BT always have something interesting up their sleeve, that’s for sure.

That Mark Brown. He’s a clever one. During my December visit to the Buffalo Trace Distillery, Mark (the President and CEO of Buffalo Trace) thought he would have a little fun with me.

I don’t think it was even 9 o’clock in the morning. But there I was, sitting in the conference room next to his office, with a “Who’s who?” of Buffalo Trace distillery workers sitting around the table. On the table were more than a dozen sample bottles, with the labels facing in the other direction so that only they could read them.

I knew what was going to happen next.

Mark told me that he has more than 1,500 different experiments going on right now, and he thought I would like taste some of them. But, he wasn’t going to tell me which experiment it was until after I tasted the whiskey and told him what I thought of it (with everyone else looking on, of course).

I nosed and tasted my way through malt whiskeys, oat whiskeys, whiskeys with different setbacks, whiskeys with different oak board “heat” treatments, etc. He pours the next whiskey for me and says:

“What do you think this one is? If you had to make a guess, what would it be?”

I nosed, I tasted. I nosed again and tasted again. It smelled like rice to me, but they’re no way I’m going embarrass myself in front of everyone and say that it smells like rice whiskey only to find out that it’s a traditional bourbon recipe spirit that was put into toasted oak barrels and infused with bamboo shoots, or something like that.

So, I just say, “Mark, with over 1,500 different experiments, there’s no way I’m going to identify what it is. Why don’t you just tell me?”

“It’s rice whiskey, John,” he said.

Great…so much for my fifteen minutes of fame.

So, I work my way through more samples until we get down to the last two. I nose and taste them twice and say: ” I don’t like these at all. ”

That’s when Mark told me: “They’re aged white rum samples.”

Talk about bending my mind. I hesitated for a moment, recalibrating my brain cells. They make terrible whiskeys, but they are fairly decent rums!

Both were distilled in 1991 from a column still in the Virgin Islands. One was aged in a new charred oak barrel. The other was aged in a used charred oak barrel. It was an experiment to see what rum aged in bourbon warehouses and Kentucky climate would taste like.

One was very clean and fairly light in flavor. The other was rich and full-bodied, but lacked subtly and refinement.

We joked about the whole thing for a while. But then I had a thought: “What if we blended the two together?” So that’s what I did.

Bingo! This stuff tasted pretty good. Certainly good enough to bottle. The Buffalo Trace team sampled the rum blend, and agreed.

But how? When? And where will it be sold? At the distillery gift shop? Specialty retailers?

According to Mark Brown, the current plan is to release the rum under the Buffalo Trace Experimental Collection line. This, I am looking forward to.

Buffalo Trace Rum. What next, I wonder?