Redwood Empire Bottled in Bond Grizzly Beast Bourbon Review

By Richard Thomas

Rating: B-

As a distillery located amid the various state and federal parklands preserving redwood forests, Redwood Empire draws heavily on forest imagery in naming its whiskeys. Their bonded rye was named after a famous redwood tree, Rocket Top; their bonded bourbon is named for North America’s biggest bear, the grizzly (this despite that, in California, grizzlies have been extinct for quite a while, and only black bears remain).

This is a four-grain bourbon, although it isn’t billed as such. The mash behind this one is 69% corn, 22% rye, 4% wheat and 5% malted barley. It’s a 5 year old bonded whiskey, and the current consignment was bottled from a batch of 26 barrels. As a bonded bourbon, it is 100 proof.

The Bourbon

Perhaps appropriately, Grizzly Beast has a reddened amber look in the glass. I found the nose akin to gingerbread with a vanilla drizzle and a dusting of brown sugar. The flavor followed very much in that vein, albeit with the ginger amped up and taking on a rooty, woody tinge to it. The finish is the real weakness here, because it was scarcely there, and really little more than just a stray fiber of woodiness.

The Price
Grizzly Beast was out of stock at the distillery at the time of writing, and online retailers who had it in stock were asking about $110 a bottle for it.