Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve 20 y.o.

[Gate]

Is this stuff as good as I have heard - and in particular, is it so good that it's worth almost twice as much as the W.L. Weller 19-year-old? I have tried the Old Rip Van Winkle 15-year-old, which is (IMHO)astonishingly good, and I would like some more old wheated bourbon. But is the Pappy really so much better as the price difference would suggest, or should I be thinking of blowing the hard-earned on the Weller?

[Veach]

If you like the 19 year old Weller, then you will love the 20 year old Pappy. The Weller is an excellent bourbon in my opinion full of sweet carmel tones with some hints of oak. The Pappy is even more so with a little chocolate and nuts. I think it one of my favorite bourbons of all times.

I am doing a tasting this Friday as a fund raising event at work and the Pappy is one of the products we will be tasting. I will try to post some more complete notes for you later. If anybody is interested, the event will be looking at aged whiskey versus old whiskey. Aged whiskey of course is whiskey aged in barrels for long periods whereas old whiskey is the bottle you may have found in your grandfather's closet. We will be tasting 6 whiskeys. We will start with a cuurent bottling of Old Forester as an example of a 6 to 8 year old bourbon. We will taste with this a bottle of Maker's Mark bottled in 1977. Next we will taste the 13 year old Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye. With this we will taste a 12 year old Mount Vernon Rye bottled in bond in 1929. We will finish by tasting the 20 year old Pappy Van Winkle as an example of extreme aged bourbon. We will finish with a 17 year old Old Rip Van Winkle bottled in bond in 1933 and made at the Glenmore distillery in Owensboro, Ky. This last bottle should be fun because I was archivist for the United Distillers Archive at Stitzel-Weller. One of the items in the items in the collection was the mash bill for this particular whiskey. It is a four grain bourbon made with corn, rye, malted barley and oats.

Mike Veach

[Gate]

Wow! Quite some tasting. I'll be very interested to hear what the four-grain whiskey was like. In the end, I realised I could get the WL Weller and another for the same price as one bottle of Pappy, so went for the WL Weller and a bottle of Sazerac Rye - and having tasted the Sazerac, I'm now wishing I'd bought two of that! What a beautiful whiskey.