American Highway Reserve Bourbon Reserve

By Richard Thomas

Rating: B

These last few years, it seems like everybody (even slightly) famous thinks they can start up a spirits brand or merit having an expression named after them. At this point, I am so sick of seeing adds for Proper Twelve that I would gladly watch Floyd Mayweather whup his ass again, and keep in mind I skipped the first fight as a non-event.

But sometimes these new celebrity-tied brands have more merit to them, both in terms of the celebrity tie-in and the juice in the bottle. Such is the case with Brad Paisley’s effort, American Highway Reserve. A 49 year old lauded singer-songwriter, Brad Paisley has produced 32 Top Ten country singles during the course of his career, and the intersection between country music and bourbon is something we’ve explored in these pages before.

The story behind the bourbon itself is more gimmicky. Apparently Bardstown Bourbon Company (BBCo) decided or was asked to take the notion of unorthodox climate, storage and maturation on the road with Paisley: they filled a truck container with barrels of bourbon, which followed Paisley around on his 2019 tour, “7,314 miles across 25 states, from coast to coast” as stated in the press release.

The gimmick bourbon was then batched with three year old BBCo bourbon, plus sourced 13 and 15 year old bourbon. All of these stocks are rye or high rye bourbon. Croakers will immediately scoff, assuming as they do that such blends always use mere drops of middle-aged whiskey to be able to claim its there and pull one over on presumed rubes. In this instance, that would be a gross factual error, seeing as how the 13 and 15 year olds comprise 47% of the mix. Paisley was reportedly quite engaged in the blending and development of the whiskey, which was bottled at 96 proof. This first run yielded 30,000 bottles; more is to follow once another container-batch is complete following the end of his 2021 tour.

The Bourbon
The aroma coming out of my glass speaks very much to the constituents in the blend, leaving aside the quarter of the stock aged in part in the tractor-trailer. It smacks of candy corn and vanilla, but with a musty leather overtone that speaks to the middle-aged half.

The flavor, however, is not nearly so hoary. At it’s heart, it is akin to the brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg blends I used to make and jar for cinnamon toast and the like. Add some vanilla powder into that jar, and you’ve captured American Highway Reserve perfectly. A tinge of oakiness rises on the back end, giving a little bit of a distinguished bite to an otherwise approachable, easy sipping bourbon. The finish starts off with sweet caramel, but this is subsumed by oak-driven spices.

The Price
The recommended price on a bottle of American Highway Reserve is $100.