Funny story…

I was trying to feed the glibertarians.com content monster when I discovered a way to make up for something that had been missing in my past submissions.  On my “cheap rye is good” series, people kept recommending Dickel’s.  But my local liquor store never had it — they occasionally had their bourbon, but never the rye.  Then one day while I was restocking, I noticed, there in the rye section — a Dickel’s bottle!  I snatched it up and took it home and did a tasting, with the following review:

 

Opening the bottle I get an immediate hit of honey.  The nose is mild.  Drinking it…  ok, I think this is a good example about how you can be “primed” to think about certain things because after that honey experience, I’m tasting mainly yellow things.  Like diacetyl, and… corn. Why am I tasting corn?  Tasting now with some water, this is much better.  I usually don’t say that one version is better than the other, it’s a different tasting/drinking experience that it mainly depends on what you’re in the mood for, but with this one I’m going to say that the opened drink is just better than straight from the bottle.  It’s not just the “shape” of the flavor, I’m actually getting better flavors out of it.  Interestingly I think you can tell something here about how the barrels were prepped. Usually you get both the caramel and the ashy flavors from wood, but here the ash is much more predominant.  I can only guess that means the barrels had a deeper/more complete char than most?  It’s tasty, I’m not sure it’s a rye.  It’s definitely worth drinking, but I don’t like it as well as other bottom-shelf ryes like Old Granddad or Rittenhouse.  The LLS didn’t have Rittenhouse in stock when I bought this so I can’t give you a value estimation since while this was more expensive than I was expecting, inflation is currently a thing.

 

So then I snapped a pic to have something to give the post visual appeal and actually looked at the bottle…

 

Dafuq is up with Apple’s phone lenses?

Well… that explains the whole tasting corn thing.  At least I can be self-satisfied with my whole “not sure this is a rye” conclusion from earlier.  So while I still haven’t found the elusive Dickel’s rye, I have discovered and easy to drink tasty cheap Tennessee whiskey.  Honestly, I like this better than I remember liking Jack, though it’s been a while since I had some of that.  I’m guessing another trip to the LLS is in order.