Featured
Featured posts represent reviews and other stories which we think will resonate particularly with readers, including especially topical stories (such as recipes themed to a particular holiday) or popular products just hitting the market. It’s important to note that the Featured category does not represent our top-rated products. You’ll find those on the sidebar to your right and in periodic features like our holiday buying guides.
Lux Row’s Ezra Brooks brand is getting the glow-up treatment, with new and reformulated versions of two of its entry-level products, Ezra Brooks Straight Rye and Bourbon Cream. Both are changing proof, recipes, bottles, and labels, so let’s dig in and see if these changes are for the better. Ezra Brooks 99 Straight Rye (2023)…
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Aspiring distillers have been known to take big risks to get into the industry. For husband and wife team Marsh & Jan Mokhtari, that moment came in 2016, when they sold their house to finance Golden State Distillery and start a new gin brand. After hundreds of batches, they launched Gray Whale Gin with a…
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Ben Holladay Distillery is keen on putting Missouri on the map among bourbon fans. Their Bottled-in-Bond Missouri Straight Bourbon Whiskey launched those efforts via their own distillate, which was then aged and bottled in Weston (population under 2,000). Now, they’re on the market with their second expression: Another bottled-in-bond bourbon, this time with soft red…
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In Clay County, Florida, along the swampy banks of the St. John River, exists a little bitty city known as Green Cove Springs, population 9,784. During the late ’60s, the members of Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, unable to practice in their hometown of Jacksonville, Florida due to noise complaints, would drive 20 miles down…
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We’re 17 years in on one of the most unicorny of whiskey unicorns, the Parker’s Heritage Collection. For 2023, you’re getting a 10 year old rye at cask strength, a vatting of distillate barreled in August, October, and December 2012, made from a mash of 51% rye, 35% corn, and 14% malted barley. Like the…
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Another fall is upon us, and that means Islay’s Bruichladdich is pushing out its biggest releases of the year. Normally we’d see these trickle out in bits and bobs, but for 2023, the distillery dropped a bomb on us all at once, with Bere Barley, Black Art, a new Port Charlotte, and the three Octomore…
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Is the world ready to try a high-end, 23-year-old flavored whiskey? One brand is banking on the answer being “yes,” and thus Crown Royal Golden Apple was born. As the newest entry in Crown Royal’s Master Series, Golden Apple is a blend of Canadian whiskies aged for 23 long years that is flavored with golden…
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It’s been three years since Highland Park inaugurated its Cask Strength Release — the first full-proof release the distillery had ever put out. We reviewed the second edition a year later, and now we’re finally on to Release No. 4. It’s not the same old story, by the way: Cask Strength No.4 is quite a…
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While Woodford Reserve’s Batch Proof has been an annual release since 2018, we’ve reviewed it only once, in 2020. The whiskey isn’t designed to change dramatically from year to year, however. It’s a mingling of standard Woodford Reserve barrels all pulled into a single batch, then bottled at barrel — or, in this case —…
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While we’ve regularly covered Martell‘s various special edition Cognacs, we’ve never taken a stroll with Cordon Bleu, which sits just below Martell XO on the quality and price band. It’s made with a high proportion of Borderies eaux de vie, but otherwise Martell doesn’t offer a whole lot of information about the product. We won’t…
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