By Richard Thomas Rating: B- OOLA is a stylishly designed micro-distillery located in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, started in 2010 by an artist and art dealer named Kirby Kallas-Lewis. Their Waitsburg Bourbon started out as a blend of sourced and in-house whiskeys, but nowadays it’s all in-house. It’s a wheated bourbon, aged for five years in standard, 53-gallon barrels. The ...
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Barrell Bourbon Batch 017 Review
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ In the hullabaloo surrounding the launch of the Barrell Craft Spirits (BCS) line of super premium whiskeys, it might be forgivable to overlook that their normal, well-established lines of spirits continue. The main case in point is the most recent Barrell Bourbon, now in its seventeenth batch. Barrell Bourbon Batch 017 is billed as a ...
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By Richard Thomas Richard Thomas, Owner-Editor Best New Whiskey, Heaven Hill 27 Year Old Bourbon: This survivor of the greatest American distillery disaster of modern times, the 1996 Heaven Hill fire, is more than just a magnificent pour of ultra aged bourbon. It also somehow got to the grand old age of 27 years, ancient in bourbon terms, without becoming ...
Read More »New TTB Regulations May Injure Craft Whiskey Sector
By Richard Thomas The Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB for short, is the agency responsible for regulating what appears on the labels of alcoholic beverages in America. If an enthusiast is familiar with the agency, that knowledge likely comes from a time when blogs and bourbon forums were rife with discontent over inconsistently applied ...
Read More »Barrell Craft Spirits Batch 001 Bourbon Review
By Richard Thomas Rating: A- Joe Beatrice’s Barrel Craft Spirits enjoys a well-earned reputation for having created a handful of series consisting of one-shot quality, cask strength blends of sourced whiskeys. Now he has taken what was already a premium operation up a level with the Barrell Craft Spirits (BCS) line. This is the first release, a mix of bourbons ...
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