By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ I’m a wood nerd. This extends well beyond whiskey: I like trees, wood floors, wood furniture, wood burning, etc. In terms of whiskey, I’ve become keenly interested in the properties of different species of oak and their regional growing patterns. This explains why I pay the keenest attention to what Seattle’s Westland Distillery does with ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: A- Brown-Forman’s revival of King of Kentucky is back for a second go-around. It joins the swollen ranks of annual, hot ticket bourbon releases, but avoids the crunch by being timed for summer rather than autumn. Last year’s was a 14 year old bourbon made from a 75% corn, 11% rye, 10% malted barley (so not ...

By Richard Thomas Started by father and son team of Lincoln and Wes Henderson, Angel’s Envy first came out in 2011, and immediately made a splash as the first high profile example of a bourbon whiskey finished in old Port pipes. That well-received release was followed the next year by the introduction of the company’s annual limited edition, Angel’s Envy ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: A- The BenRiach has a reputation as being the Speyside distillery that does a little bit of everything, working with peated and unpeated malts and aging in all manner of casks. Yet being a jack of all trades doesn’t mean they have mastered none. Instead, it just means the distillery has a big palette of whiskies ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: A Back in 2014, Jim Beam celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first exploratory, almost prototype release of Booker’s with a 25th Anniversary Edition. That limited edition whiskey was noteworthy as having been barreled in January 2003, so it was 10 years and some months in age rather than the more usual six to eight year ...