Don -- if I melt this down, does it turn into a Manhattan or an Old Fashion??
Eli- if you mix it with Pappy Van Winkle, you could charge as much as Leatherwood.
Frankly, Pappy isn't worth it. That one is an even worse offender than Macallan in terms of marketing > product quality. Not to say it isn't a good whiskey, sometimes it's
really good, but more often than not you're just paying for age and name rather than anything actually worth drinking.
There's a couple reasons American whiskeys—whether they be American single malts, ryes, corn whiskey, wheat whiskey, or various different mash bills of bourbon* usually aren't aged nearly as long as whiskeys in the UK, Ireland, other parts of Europe, or Japan, and the biggest one is the climate.Our climate in our main whiskey making regions is a lot more variable than over there in terms of both temperature and humidity swings, and that means that the spirit has a lot more interaction with the wood. Add on to that that the rules for bourbon specifically
specify that it has to be charred
virgin oak that the majority of the aging is done in (finishing in other barrels
is actually allowed, although there was some confusion over whether or not that was actually the case when Angel's Envy started doing their thing), and the wood can really take over on an older bourbon.
It's especially noticeable at the ten year mark, just try a few different batches of the Henry McKenna Bottled in Bond. Heaven Hill goes above and beyond and do each one as a single barrel as well as being BiB, and on top of that, they go beyond the minimum four years for the label and do ten years as the standard. Both of those go hand in hand to mean there can be a lot more variance batch-to-batch than most other bourbons, and some of them are so powerfully
oaky that you basically get mildly vanilla flavored burny wood water.
As for whether it would be a Manhattan or an Old Fashioned if you melted it down, neither—it's missing the vermouth and bitters to be a Manhattan, and it's missing the bitters and sugar to be an Old Fashioned, and they're both overly diluted.
Now that I've said all that: What in the name of Bottesini, Dragonetti, and Simandl is aging rosin in a bourbon barrel going to do except maybe make it smell a bit different? Are they mixing it in a used bourbon barrel and then letting it rest and solidify before melting it down
again to actually pour it?
If these people actually make money I'm going to start selling apple and pear wood smoked rosin to go with the bourbon barrel rosin, really entice those brand new young orchestra students to lick it and try to eat it.
You all did that too, right?
*Mash bill is very important in distinguishing all of these, because rye, corn, and wheat whiskey can all still have a mix of grains involved unless they're labeling it as 100% of one single grain; the only one where you know it's going to be 100% barley is if its labeled a single malt, because our legal definition for an American single malt basically matches the one in the UK for any of their single malts: 100% malted barley, mashed, distilled, and aged entirely at a single distillery in the USA to be termed American, distilled to no more than 160 proof, etc. etc. etc.; as far as I know we don't have anybody doing anything like the uniquely Irish "Single Pot Still" whiskeys which are a mix of malted and unmalted barley, but there's enough Red Breast and Green Spot going around that I don't think we need to worry.
