Review #255: America 250 Edition Evan Williams Single Barrel

MASH BILL: 78% corn, 10% rye, 12% malted barley

AGE: 7 yr 2 mo

PROOF: 117.76

COST: $40 for 750mL bottle (Blackwell's online)

For all of you in the United States, I hope you’re having a great 4^th of July so far and the rest of the day is full of festivities and you wake up tomorrow with 10 fingers, 10 toes, and 2 eyes. If you don’t, well then, I guess you have a hell of a story to tell. At my household be celebrating with family and friends, two pork butts off the smoker for some BBQ sandwiches, apple pie, baseball, and a bunch of delicious pours to be shared with great company. It’s going to be a general all-American type of day!

One of the pours that we’ll be diving into is this America 250 Edition Evan Williams Single Barrel release. I feel like the whole “America 250” thing has essentially just become a marketing tool, and the American whiskey industry wasn’t short on users of it. Over the last 4-6 months, we have seen too many semiquincentennial themed releases – so much so that I finally gave up on trying to keep up with them all in early May. However, this one in particular caught my attention and I wanted to check out.

As a Heaven Hill fan, and particularly of the 78/10/12 mash bill, Evan Williams and Elijah Craig expressions always hit well with my palate. But what I was particularly excited about with this release is that it wasn’t just their normal bourbon that was bottled with a special label. Instead, the master distiller, Conor O’Driscoll, hand-picked 250 barrels of their 78/10/12 bourbon mash bill to be bottled for this release to commemorate the 250^th Anniversary of the United States. Check out the Behind the Bottle for a brief history lesson, but for now, let’s get to the review!

Reviewed neat in a Glencairn.

APPEARANCE: Russet copper color (1.3) thin legs that are slow to form.

NOSE: Heavy sweetness but with a spicy bite. I get candy bar vibes right away with a blend of milk chocolate, nutty nougat, and caramel. A bold red fruit reduction with a splash of balsamic vinegar giving it a slightly dark, acidic twang. Orange zest, clove, cinnamon, and a cooling menthol feel at the back of the throat. A lot of what is going on here on the nose is attributed to a combination of esterification and the Heaven Hill yeast strain, but it is quintessential Heaven Hill in the best of ways: that nuttiness along with the fruity and slight acidic notes along with more spice than you would expect from a 10% rye mash bill.

PALATE: A fairly thin mouthfeel similar to a watered-down simple syrup. Big brown sugar up front with a nice spicy oak. Caramel and black cherry build and are really pulled out with a good chew. Black pepper and a touch of unsweetened iced tea. The more I sip it I get a cherry cola note. Towards the end of the sip and going into the finish is a touch of clove and cinnamon. It does have a bit of a bite from proof heat. A couple drops of water helped cut the proof heat quite a bit and opened more notes of vanilla and orange zest.

FINISH: A long, dry finish. Lots of barrel character here with barrel char, burnt vanilla beans, and tannic, cured oak. A numbing spice of cinnamon and black pepper continues to linger from the palate. There’s a nice touch of caramel that shows up as some of the burnt/charred notes fade. A touch of black cherry shows up late but disappears just as quickly as it shows up.

RATING: 6.9/10

OVERALL: It’s a pour with nice sweetness throughout with a spicy touch that consistently demands respect. While I really appreciate this being released at a respectable 117.76 proof, I do think it benefits from being proofed down a tad to cut some of that proof heat (just not quite at the age to help round off some of the sharp edges at such a high proof). The candy bar note I get is the highlight. Of course, I’m a sucker for those rich red fruit notes as well. This is a fun bottle to enjoy on a day like today! (My rating doesn’t consider price/value, but at $40, this is a REALLY high value. On my website, I gave it a 9.5/10 for value. 7+ years, 117+ proof, high quality single barrel hand picked by the master distiller…I mean, you can’t ask for much more. I’m hoping there are discounts on this bottle after the holiday is over because I’m going to scoop some up!)

Behind the Bottle

This bottle I have is from barrel # 95 of 250 for this release. If we consider each barrel represents 1 year of the history of the United States since its founding, this bottle would represent year 1871. While it was not a particularly exciting year (the Great Chicago Fire may be the most significant occurrence that is still talked about today), there was some excitement in the spirits industry brewing at that time that helped fuel what became the Bottle-in-Bond Act pf 1897.

For those that know what the Bottled-in-Bond Act is, I would wager that less than 50% know that a big driver of it was rectifiers making swill and selling it as “whiskey,” and I would further wager that less than 20% of people know that another driver was how whiskey was being taxed. A little event known as The Whiskey Ring was directly related to excise tax on spirits and is sometimes credited as the straw that broke the camel’s back to drive solutions to be explored and ultimately led to the Bottled-in-Bond Act.

Prior to the Bottled-in-Bond Act in 1897, whiskey was taxed by how much distillate the producer made. From the distiller’s perspective, this was very unfair. For example, for a 53 gallon barrel that was filled to capacity, the distiller would be taxed on 53 gallons of whiskey. However, after 6 years of aging with roughly 3% going to the angel’s share per year and roughly 5 gallons going to the devil’s cut, that means the distiller would have been taxed for 53 gallons but would only have about 39 gallons left after 6 years to sell. They got taxed for 14 gallons that they never got to make a profit on! This drove all the wrong practices. It made distillers want to sell whiskey at a younger age to avoid more losses over long maturation periods, it made them want to dilute it out as much as possible, and more generally, it made them want to find ways to avoid being taxed altogether.

The Whiskey Ring was a collusion of distillers and government officials to avoid paying the excise tax on distilled spirits. The distillery avoided paying taxes and the government officials involved got a little cut for themselves. After a long investigation, it was revealed that The Whiskey Ring started in 1871 and continued to 1875 when it was blown wide open. Over that time, hundreds of people were involved and implicated. Even President Grant’s own administration was drug through the mud on this one as his personal secretary was called out by name for involvement. In the end, the government seized 16 distilleries, arrested over 300 people, indicted nearly 240, and convicted 110, and millions of tax dollars were lost while lining the pockets of corrupt politicians and government officials as well as shady distillers.

The Whiskey Ring compounded with what the public was already aware of with rectifiers selling snake oil whiskey. This drove the public to desire more oversight for the spirits industry (as well as honest distillers that were having to compete with all the bad actors). The Bottle-in-Bond Act of 1897 was eventually enacted to help restore the public’s trust in the whiskey industry. This act is considered the most important spirits law passed in the history of the United States, and easily a top 3 for bourbon specifically. While I think it would have come to fruition at some point, it can loosely be tied to the start of the Whiskey Ring in 1871.

1 | Disgusting | see my 1/10 ratings

2 | Poor | see my 2/10 ratings

3 | Bad | see my 3/10 ratings

4 | Sub-par | see my 4/10 ratings

5 | Good | see my 5/10 ratings

6 | Very Good | see my 6/10 ratings

7 | Great | see my 7/10 ratings

8 | Excellent | see my 8/10 ratings

9 | Incredible | see my 9/10 ratings

10 | Perfect | see my 10/10 ratings