Bottle 03: The Burning Chair Cask Strength Bourbon
The Burning Chair Cask Strength Bourbon Barrel Select
Distillery: Savage & Cook
Region/Country: Vallejo, California
Age: 4 years
ABV: 59.4%
Cask type(s): New American oak then finished in grenache barrels
Grain Bill: 75% Corn, 21% Rye, 4% Malted Barley
Tasting Notes 1
- Nose: Honey, caramel, fig, orange blossom, toffee.
- Palate: Spice, orange marmalade, oak, brown butter
- Finish: Plum, fig, blackberry
Finishing Casks
Scotch and bourbon are required to be matured in oak barrels, but often additional barrels are also used to impart different flavors to the spirit. It is written that cask finishing began historically as a cost-saving measure; merchants carrying both wine and whisky would refill casks with whisky instead of buying new casks. These days, it is common to see old wine, port, sherry, or rum casks get reused for aging spirits.
While finishing in secondary casks is well-known in the history of scotch and Irish whisk(e)y, in the case of bourbon, there’s been a little more discussion over the past few years around how secondary casking changes the spirit. Remember, a bourbon is defined as
- aged in new, charred oak containers,
- containing no other additives,
Does aging in a different cask with traces of rum, wine, etc. count as an additive? It’s certainly not a new oak container. As recent as 2018, new legislation has been suggested to clarify the issue:
If spirits are aged in more than one oak barrel (for example, if a whisky is aged 2 years in a new charred oak barrel and then placed into a second new charred oak barrel for an additional 6 months,) only the time spent in the first barrel is counted towards the ‘‘age.’’
or
When a producer stores the whisky in oak containers and then stores it in a different type of container, such as a maple barrel, the spirit becomes a distilled spirits specialty product and must be labeled with a statement of composition, such as ‘‘Bourbon Whisky finished in maple barrels.’’
Regardless, barrel-finished bourbons have become as common as they are delicious. We’ll sample a few more before Christmas gets here. In the case of The Burning Chair, the fruit notes are likely thanks to the grenache 2 barrels that the bourbon is finished in.
Advent Reflection
O Emmanuel
By Malcolm Guite3
O come, O come, and be our God-with-us
O long-sought With-ness for a world without,
O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.
Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name
Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,
O quickened little wick so tightly curled,
Be folded with us into time and place,
Unfold for us the mystery of grace
And make a womb of all this wounded world.
O heart of heaven beating in the earth,
O tiny hope within our hopelessness
Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,
To touch a dying world with new-made hands
And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.
Footnotes
Because this is a barrel select, tasting notes will be very specific to the batch. These notes are sourced from a similar batch: Burning Chair Grenache Finished Bourbon Preview↩︎
“Characteristic flavor profiles on Grenache include red fruit flavors (raspberry and strawberry) with a subtle, white pepper spice note.” Wikipedia↩︎
O Emmanuel; a final antiphon and more music, December 23, 2022↩︎