Kentucky 74

The spirit

Caramel, vanilla, and a carpenter’s-shop oak fill the nose — less grain sweetness than bourbon, more extract, and no ethanol bloom when you put your nose in the glass. Soft, slightly syrupy, and recognizably oak-driven on the sip; glycerine and gum are on the label, and you can feel them thickening the middle. In an Old Fashioned the structure holds. Neat, it drinks like flavored wood tea with ambition: short vanilla on the exit and a lingering tannin that reads more like wood tea than barrel heat. Chill it. Use it in a cocktail, over ice, or split — do not expect proof. The oak and caramel show up; the heat does not; the thickeners are doing part of the work that ethanol usually does. Light body, short finish, extract-led rather than grain-sweet: a cocktail ingredient first, a neat bourbon stand-in only if you accept wood tea for barrel heat. Carpenter’s-shop oak before the sip, syrupy oak on the sip, vanilla-and-tannin on the exit — one continuous extract story, without the bloom of proof. Oak and caramel are the glass; grain sweetness is not. Chill the glass; keep it in the cocktail where the oak can do its work.