What Is Whiskey Finishing_ - Jameson Black Barrel

Welcome to the Whiskey Vault. I'm Daniel Whittington, Chancellor of Wizard Academy and Whiskey Marketing School. Today, we are talking about whiskey finishing and drinking a Jameson thanks to Marco Rico who donated specifically because he was like, I want you to review Black Barrel. I haven't seen a review for it. I am not finding the good spot to peel this little thing. Oh, there we go. There's our little, that is not easy to reach. Remember the old days? We're back there again. There we go. Now I can get it, okay. Jameson, it's classic. Close to my heart, Jameson. Glad we're getting to pour this one. Thank you, Mark. Okay, so here's the crazy thing. Throughout history, you have, in the early days of spirits, written about. Early on, distillation goes way back, way back. But distillation, as far as the first mention of what we would now refer to as the words that turned into whiskey, we're talking 1400s, 15th century. But the thing you were drinking at that point was not what you and I would consider to be whiskey. It's closer to a moonshine or almost a gin or a pachine, which means it may not just be grain. There may be herbs flavoring and making things taste better. It's very rudimentary in a lot of ways. Then by the time you get into the 18th century, you're getting into actual production level, full-on whiskey, aging in barrels. And you find that transition somewhere where people are using barrels to store things and then discovering that it has an impact on the wine or the whiskey in this case. And so what you end up with is a couple hundred years, 1700s, 1800s, crawling into the 1900s, where barrels are used to age whiskey, but the tradition is just you fill a barrel and then you mix them together when you're releasing a product. This is the origin of blended scotch and Irish blends eventually, grain whiskey getting mixed into these things. And that is that, say you have some sherry barrels and originally almost all whiskey was stored in some sort of wine cask because that was the one that was most easy to get your hands on. They would make wine, they transport it to the UK. They would dump it and or drink it. They would fill it with whiskey and they would age it. And that's how it ended up. Around the time that we ended up with American bourbon barrels starting to show up on the market, they end up eventually making their way over to the UK and they start becoming a dominant use for whiskey aging. But it's not until the 1980s, guys, 1980s, which is nuts that it's that recent in a lot of our lifetime, according to the statistics of who watches this channel, that David Stewart, at the time, the malt master at Galvani in Scotland, decides, yeah, yeah, we've been aging in bourbon and aging in sherry and then we mix them. But what would happen if we took whiskey from a bourbon cask, dumped it, moved it into a sherry cask and then let it age in the sherry cask until it had already combined all of the flavors that we wanted to pull from the sherry barrels. So you dump a bunch of bourbon barrels, you refill a bunch of sherry casks and then you just watch and test until it's just right. Then when you dump it, you have Galvani Doublewood. Now, at the original time, it was branded Galvani Classic. But if you can believe it, that's, as far as we can figure, the first true large brand use of put a whiskey in one barrel, take it out, put it in another barrel. To me, that's remarkable, that it's that recent of an innovation. And it just goes to show you how slow old industries are to sort of like, let's innovate, let's try some things. And by the way, that, you heard me rant about innovation. That's an actual innovation. Instead of, that's, I mean, that's real. That's a big one. I think Glenn Maringy was the first to use sautern cask to finish theirs. And then by the time we're into the late 1980s, early 1900s, 1990s, 1900s, early 1990s, that's when Galvani rebrands as Doublewood. And that's when, across the industry, people start to go, hey, that's the thing we can do. And then everything changes. But first, let's drink Jameson Black Barrel. Jameson Black Barrel, this was really fun because I got to visit Middleton, now, a long time ago. And we got to meet Gary Buckley, who's the master cooper, like, fifth generation master cooper at Middleton. And he was the coolest guy. And I went to watch some videos and try to understand what's actually happening with Jameson Black Barrel. And I got to watch, like, five videos with Gary Buckley. And it was so fun. He and I sat next to each other at dinner and talked nonstop about Texas. Turns out, Gary's an Alamo aficionado. Like, remember the Alamo Alamo. And being Texan, it's in my bones to know every single nuance of the story of the Alamo. So we talked at length about a bunch of really cool stuff that had nothing to do with whiskey. He taught me how to cooper a barrel. I used what he taught me multiple times when I was working at Crowded Barrel Whiskey Distillery. Jameson Black Barrel is different from the normal Jameson in that it's got a third type of barrel being used in the aging. So the typical Jameson is a blend, right? Grain and single malt and pot. I think it's all three. Is it all three or is it pot still? Oh, my brain's fuzzy on that one. But then they put it into bourbon and sherry barrels. It gets blended back together and then they release the big brand Jameson. The Black Barrel, they also use casks that have been opened up and then recharged again and then refilled. And so you get a little bit more of that woken up. Think of like the STR shaved toast recharge casks that were sort of made popular by a certain someone named Swan. And it's sort of in that direction. And so what it should do is push forward the oak notes into the Jameson Classic. So, and I think it's got a little lower grain percentage in this blend, a little more of the heavier pot still components. And it smells like it. It's everything you know in Jameson, but darker, slightly darker. Ironically back Black Barrel, but it is. It's maybe not darker. It's denser. It's warmer. It's mid-tones turned up. It's a sepia tone filter. It's heavier in the mids. Deep vanilla, deep caramel, slight tannin, little more oak. We're taking a sip. Cheers to you, Mark. Whoa, super vanilla. So I used to keep this in the house all the time and it's been a while since I have, but my memory is that is a very distinct difference when you AB between the Budget Jameson and the Black Barrel. And it's everything I love most about Jameson, but oh my gosh, that's a first. That's never happened, but turned up more so. And what a waste. I'm refilling that one. I think psychologically, my right hand is trying to avoid the knife that I stuck there. Let's do that. Yeah, just it's more so, just more so. And I like it better than Jameson 18 because the 18 softens a whole bunch of things that I like to still be there. It's still got some drama and some sparkle. So it's nice. If you're looking for a good budget, I mean, this is under 40 bucks a bottle. And it's, I think, my favorite accessible Jameson. If I was gonna put my favorite powers that I always sip on as John's Lane and my favorite Jameson that I would just make my go-to, it's probably gonna be either this one or they have like an actual classic pot still. Jameson, that one's good, but this one's great. Ah, okay. So now the scotch industry really took on finishing and started using it all over the place as a way to add different flavors and bring in. And now the list of casks that are being used to finish whiskey is, I mean, crap. I think I counted over 40 last time I was looking at the lists and making a, making a note. I mean, they're putting tequila, they're putting all the different kinds of brandies, all the different kinds of, you know, Armagnac, Cognac, the apple brandy, all, any other spirit. Anything that ages in a barrel. Someone is, coffee, someone is now emptying and then putting whiskey in it. And in America, it went even more so, partially because, America, and partially because finishing showed up at a time where it overlapped with the explosion of American craft. And one of the things that happened with American craft whiskey is that we didn't go from 20 distilleries to a thousand distilleries making whiskey. We went from 20 distilleries making whiskey to a thousand brands, and maybe a couple hundred people making whiskey. And then slowly people started making their own stuff. But first, there were a thousand new whiskey brands on the shelf and 60% of them were sourcing. And of those, 80% were sourcing from MGP. And how do you differentiate yourself when you're all sourcing the same stuff? You finish it. Crowded Barrel did the exact same thing. And so I think cask finishing just really took over the American craft market and became almost a truism, like a cheese, like, oh yeah, of course you finished it. We've now reached the other side where people have calmed down. A lot of those brands are gone. And people are being a little bit more methodical and intentional about using cask finishing with an end goal in mind. Like the Iron Root Cigar blends or the way that Balcones is using different sherry things and blending. Anyway, so we're finally, and we were early on, but the frantic, must finish a barrel, is starting to die down a little bit. Thank God. Now here's the one complaint I have, and it's not even a complaint, it's just a question mark, and I don't know what to do with it. At what point does something stop being a finish and start being aging? There's no legal requirement for how long. So last month, I saw a bottle that was two years in New American Oak bourbon, and then finished for six years in a sherry cask. Is that a finish? Or is that an aging component? And what's the difference? And is it just semantics, or is there a thing there? And I don't know. In my brain, a finish just means you're sort of using this barrel to accent and fill in the empty spaces like seasoning. But once you cross the two year, one year, two year, now you're just aging. And that's not a bad thing, but I think you might want to avoid the word finishing and then adding a multi-year statement to how long it was finished in. Again, I would make an exception for that for Mizunara, because Mizunara barrels take forever to have an impact, and that really would legitimately be a finish. So this is something that I don't know, but people on the internet will argue about it forever. So feel free to go join the fray if you so choose. Cheers to you, and I'm really glad you're here. Welcome to the Whiskey Vault. Aged for at least 10 years, but finished for three years in black V-neck T-shirts. Like and subscribe for the V-neck finish.