Review of Four Roses 2020 Small Batch Limited Edition

Bybrettatlas September 4, 2020 0 Comments
Once a year, Four Roses releases its Small Batch Limited Edition (SmBLE) bourbon, a unique blend orchestrated by Master Distiller Brent Elliott. You won’t see a bottle sitting on a shelf unless the store is asking over $400 for it, and even then you might not see one. The reason is simple: These are consistently among the strongest whiskey releases of the year. Among the many reasons Four...

Review of Wilderness Trail Settler’s Select Rye

Bybrettatlas February 19, 2019 0 Comments
One of my absolute favorite Kentucky traditions is our barrel picking group’s “hotel room double blind tasting” the night before our annual fall charity event. Each year, Brian Gomolka outdoes himself and I find myself searching for a new favorite bottle. This past November, the stars all aligned like never before. In a field of what ended up being six rye whiskies, two stood out above...

Book Review of ‘The Whiskey Rebellion’ by William Hogeland

Bybrettatlas February 2, 2019 0 Comments
William Hogeland’s The Whiskey Rebellion was published in 2006, well before the Bourbon Boom, and well before Lin Manuel Miranda had children rapping about Alexander Hamilton as a hero. Brilliant though Hamilton was, he was tone deaf and out of touch with the people. He was also conniving, manipulative and unscrupulous in the pursuit of what he believed to be loftier objectives.  History...

How The Bourbon Crusaders Determined the Best Bourbons on the Shelf

Bybrettatlas November 12, 2018 0 Comments
On Monday, November 5 2018, the Bourbon world was abuzz about a little charity event that raised over $340,000 for the American Cancer Society over the weekend. For more about the auction itself, Fred Minnick’s excellent Forbes piece captures it beautifully. What may have been overshadowed by the shocking and magical live auction at “Willett To Be Cured” was the months-long, massive blind...

Book Review of ‘Bourbon & Bullets: True Stories of Whiskey, War and Military Service’ by John Tramazzo

Bybrettatlas November 6, 2018 0 Comments
I am comfortable admitting that I likely wouldn’t have read this book if John Tramazzo hadn’t sent me a copy of it. I follow Tramazzo (Bourbonscout on Instagram), but I wasn’t all that interested in a collection of stories where soldiers drank together. When I saw that Fred Minnick wrote the foreword, I knew this book wasn’t what I thought it would be. A celebrated author and military...

Book Review of ‘Bourbon Justice’ by Brian Haara

Bybrettatlas October 8, 2018 0 Comments
In the book’s foreward, Fred Minnick himself tells us, “let me be clear: I cannot express how important this book is to bourbon history.” I’ve read and reviewed multiple Minnick books and they are amongst the very few I recommend to others. He’s spot on about Brian Haara’s phenomenal new book Bourbon Justice- This is instant classic material. Like many of you, I became aware of...

Bourbonomics

Bybrettatlas April 18, 2018 0 Comments
Mark Twain wrote that Tom Sawyer “had discovered a great law of human action, namely that in order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.” That was true nearly 150 years ago, when whiskey was anything but coveted, referred to by popular nicknames like “coffin varnish” and “strychnine.”  Today’s Tom Sawyer would be running the...

Gordy Hue and the Greatest Bourbon Story You’ve Never Heard

Bybrettatlas February 28, 2018 0 Comments
If you're a fan of Bourbon, then you’ve likely heard of Pappy Van Winkle.  And if you’ve heard of Pappy Van Winkle then know it’s coveted by everyone from aficionados to the people who cut their hair. I’ve even seen annual releases of Pappy advertised as “The Holy Grail of Bourbons.” However, seasoned Bourbon drinkers or collectors with an interest in history have...

Taste More, Listen Less

Bybrettatlas November 10, 2017 0 Comments
In a Louisville hotel room overlooking the Haymarket whiskey bar, my friend Brian had arranged something special. As I entered the room, I instantly spotted three rows of semi-filled glasses, each row dead-ending at an amber bottle marked with the letters ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. “Oh, hell yes!” I giddily exclaimed. Nothing brings a room of whiskey ‘experts’ back down to earth like...

Review of Kentucky Owl Rye Batch #1

Bybrettatlas September 29, 2017 0 Comments
From the press release: “This unique offering is produced from a collection of barrels blended and brought to proof to accentuate both the delicate profile and the full-flavored body of the whiskey. Master Blender, Dixon Dedman, crafted the small batch rye with the same passion and high quality that goes into his family's award-winning bourbon. On the heels of a seven-market release of...