Tuesday 4 December 2012

Cooking With Whisky: It Begins!




















Whisky: Buffalo Trace

 

Distillery/Brand:

Buffalo Trace

 

Bottling:

Buffalo Trace

Region:
American

 

ABV:

40%

 

Colour:

Young Sauternes

Review:
My wife every so often decides that she's going to cook up some beautiful ribs that are cooked in a lovely sexy bourbon sauce.

However this poses a problem for me as she uses MY bourbon to cook said ribs.

But I came up with a solution, she uses the bourbon, I buy more bourbon.

Great solution right!?!

So she took it upon herself recently to cook up not one batch of these ribs, but four batches.

One for each family member.

Problem is that's going to take a LOT of bourbon, more then I had on hand.

Solution is to go pick up more bourbons, new bourbons!

I always take the opportunity when my wife makes bourbon ribs to pick up bourbons that I've never tried before, or bourbons that it's been a very long time since I've tried them.

So we head out to Dan Murphys to pick up some new bourbons.

We need three different bottles of bourbon and I decide to go with three completely different bourbons that are all new to me.

Buffalo Trace (weirdly enough I've had all of his big brothers), Wild Turkey and Bulleit bourbon.

We get all the bourbons home and over the course of the day my lovely wife does 99% of the prep while I try to help out and generally get in the way.

Hey what else are husbands for?!

Now I convince my wife to use whisky from some of each bottle in order to make sure that I can grab a sample from each whisky.

Now it's time to take these whiskies out for a spin!

I decide to start with Buffalo Trace, having tried multiple versions of it's big brothers, George T Stagg, William L Weller and Thomas H Handy.

I pour a wee bit of the Buffalo Trace into the glencairn and decide to give it a nose.

Oak, coconut, caramel, vanilla, burnt sugars, and cinnamon make this a very enjoyable nose.

Time for a taste!

Oak comes through first, quite strongly, then moving to hints of vanilla, bits of coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg, hints of cherries.

It's quite sweet with a wee bit of oak tannins providing some bitterness.

However the body feels quite thin to me, coming in at that 40%. Even a 5% jump up in strength would have served this bourbon quite well.

Quite a very short finish with coconut and vanilla ending with a faint hint of sugar at the very end.

Not a bad bourbon.

Especially for $50 odd AUS, considering that Jim Beam and his company run at around $35 AUS.

Definitely spend the extra $15 bucks for the better whisky, but personally I find that I enjoy his big brothers much more, even if they are six times more expensive.

Nose:        20/25
Taste:       20/25
Finish:      20/25
Balance:   20/25

Overall:    80/100

2 comments:

  1. hey! i wanna know the recipe to this magical bourbon ribs! what does the bourbon do to the ribs??? how does it taste differently, etc??? :D thanks for the fun article!

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    Replies
    1. Hhahaha I'll PM you the recipe when I get a chance! We're still trying to get the recipe perfected, but alot of sweet spiciness!

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