Like a lot of people in the UK, the classic Jack and coke was a go-to drink for me in my younger years. Like most I didn’t think too much about what the whiskey really was, and how it was different from other whiskies at the bar. In fact I wouldn’t even really have called myself a whiskey drinker, it was just a combination that happened to taste good, and I knew that in the event that JD wasn’t available, Jim Beam was a workable substitute. Two things happened to get me wanting to know more about American whiskey – first of all I tried drinking a glass of Scotch on the rocks in an attempt to appear sophisticated in front of some friends, and realised it didn’t taste at all the same. Secondly curiosity led me to buy that triple Jack Daniels miniature set you see in supermarkets, with the regular JD, the Single Barrel and the ‘Gentleman Jack’. I challenged myself to try them neat, side-by-side, to see if I could tell the difference; my first ‘flight’ of whiskey.
Whilst I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time to describe the congeners and flavours in detail, I did instantly recognise that the Single Barrel Jack was quite a bit richer and more enjoyable than the other two. So I invested in a bottle and drank it on special occasions. (‘Special Occasion’ was never defined in any great detail…) Because it was expensive, I didn’t want to mix it with cola, I preferred to drink it with ice, thus achieving the appearance of sophistication but with a taste I enjoyed more than the Scotch.
So whilst browsing the spirits aisle in Asda, I decided to find another whiskey I could use for mixing that was more interesting than regular Jack, but not as pricey as the Single Barrel. What I picked was Woodford Reserve, because it was a reasonable price. What I quickly realised, however, was that this also was too nice to be used with a mixer. And that was when it hit me that I was actually starting to enjoy drinking bourbon by itself. Maybe, after all, I am a whiskey man. And by golly the bottles do look pretty next to each other on the shelf.
By this point I’d tried five different bourbons. Many would argue I’d only tried two (Jim Beam and Woodford), as Jack Daniels doesn’t count. With the greatest respect to many of my whiskey loving friends, I don’t have much patience for that distinction. Jack Daniels meets every legal definition of Bourbon; for reasons best known to themselves the makers prefer to market it as Tennessee Whiskey and say that it has something to do with charcoal. (That said, I’ve not acquired the anti-Jack snobbery held by a lot of bourbon drinkers; and the Single Barrel still gets a bit of my love from time to time, as well as the White Rabbit Saloon bottling.)
So I started keeping an eye out for other bourbons and American whiskeys (I’m not changing my tune here, there are some American whiskeys which are not bourbon) to try, and found that it took a little effort to find many at all. Makers Mark, Bulleit, Buffalo Trace and Wild Turkey quickly came up on the radar, with most bars that offer any kind of a choice having at least one of those on the shelf. The real eye opener was when I came across a whiskey that I actually didn’t enjoy so much. So I started keeping a notebook on what I thought of the whiskeys I tried, and going further afield in my search.
That was some years ago. At the time of writing I have tried and written down 97 whiskies in my little book (which has an equivalent Pintrest board for when I don’t have the book on me!) and have explored dozens of specialist bars and venues – which very often goes hand in hand with my other, more casual exploration of the UK’s best BBQ Smokehouses! A good variety of bourbon (and American whiskey generally) is nowhere near as easy to come by here in the UK as it is in its native land, as I realised when I visited a liquor store in Texas and stared down the vast rows of hundreds of bourbons. But that just makes the hunt all the more fun.
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