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Old Terrell named this single barrel Jefferson Street No. 2, after the address they are rebuilding on.There is no still ...
09/07/2026

Old Terrell named this single barrel Jefferson Street No. 2, after the address they are rebuilding on.

There is no still on Jefferson Street yet. There is a construction site at 411-417 and a brand that decided to put the address on a label anyway.
I like that more than I expected to.

The short version of why that address matters: Caleb Terrell was distilling on the family farm outside Paducah in 1835. His grandnephew Sid Terrell registered it as DSP-KY-34 in 1903. In 1916 a fire that started in the mailroom took the building and roughly 1,300 barrels with it, and that was the end of it for a century. Sid's great-nephew Logan Davis picked the name back up in 2023 and started restoring the original site in 2025.

So the still is not running yet. The name went on the bottle first.

Now the whiskey. Eight years, 113.4 proof, 60% corn, 36% rye, 4% malted barley.

The nose is sweet and spicy at the same time, with stewed raisin sitting under all of it and sweet to***co coming in behind that and staying.

The palate leads exactly like the nose promised. Stewed raisin arrives first, then it turns spicy through the middle with cinnamon, clove and nutmeg stacking on top of each other. That is 36% rye showing up where you can see it.
Then the finish pulls the spice back a step and puts a slightly bitter walnut in its place. It holds for more than a minute.

Every piece of this hands off to the piece after it. The nose tells you what is coming, the palate does it, the finish carries it out. That sounds like a small thing until you drink something that does not do it.

Any bottle that told you on the nose exactly what it was about to do, and then did it?

Old Terrell 8 year bourbon handed me a note I have never once pulled out of a glass. Marzipan. Not almond, not nuts in g...
09/06/2026

Old Terrell 8 year bourbon handed me a note I have never once pulled out of a glass. Marzipan. Not almond, not nuts in general. Marzipan, sugar and all.

That was the nose, sitting behind caramel, vanilla, toasted oak, a little char, and to***co.
But the thing I keep coming back to is what happened before I ever poured it.

Most brands describe their own whiskey the safe way. Caramel, vanilla, oak, done. It costs them nothing and it sells fine. Old Terrell went the other direction. Go read their tasting notes on their own website and the finish is listed as malt and green tea leaves.

Green tea. On the bottle they lead with.
That is the hardest thing in the glass to sell, and they printed it anyway.

So I poured it and paid attention. Powdered sugar dusted vanilla caramels out front, which is right in the neighborhood of the French toast they describe. Then the marzipan comes back on the mid and brings baking cocoa with it, and behind that, clove. Not polite clove folded into a baking blend. The one that steps out where you can see it.

And the finish? Dusty malt. Bitter green tea. Clove hanging on through all of it.
They told me exactly what was coming and then it came.

Eight years, 108 proof, 60% corn, 36% rye, 4% malted barley. That rye number is doing real work, and if your shelf runs toward dessert bourbon this one is going to read as serious and a little stern. If you drink rye, it will make sense inside of two sips.

There is one thing I would change about it, and it says more about my sweet tooth than about the whiskey.

What is the most honest tasting note you have ever seen a brand print about its own bottle? I want to know if anyone has topped green tea.

In 1916 a fire tore through a distillery on Jefferson Street in Paducah, took roughly 1,300 barrels with it, and stopped...
09/05/2026

In 1916 a fire tore through a distillery on Jefferson Street in Paducah, took roughly 1,300 barrels with it, and stopped the operation for more than a century.

That was Old Terrell.

It started in 1835, when Caleb Terrell began distilling corn he grew on his own Paducah farm. His grandnephew Sid Terrell later formalized it under DSP-KY-34, one of Kentucky's early distilling licenses. Then the fire, and then nothing, for over a hundred years.

In 2023 Logan Davis, Sid's great-nephew, started it back up. Restoration began in 2025 at the same 411-417 Jefferson Street address.
Here is the part that stuck with me. Most brands that reach back this far are reaching back for the label. They find an old name, build a story around it, and fill the bottle from somewhere else. Old Terrell is doing the opposite. Same family, same street, same DSP lineage. The history is not the marketing. It is the reason the thing exists at all.

The current release is an 8-year Kentucky straight small batch, 108 proof, on a mash bill of 60 percent corn, 36 percent rye, and 4 percent malted barley. That rye number is high enough to matter. It reads as classic bourbon with more structure than the word "balanced" usually promises.

They are not waiting on the building to start doing things, either. The single barrel program is already running, and they built it so you do not have to take a whole barrel to participate. Partial picks start around thirty bottles, which puts barrel selection in reach of groups and small businesses that could never justify the full commitment. Membership is live too, quarterly and shipped, with a web app for reserving barrels and getting into events.

Then there is where it is pointed. Family farmland, grain, honey, all of it aimed at a real farm-to-bottle model where the land ends up in the liquid and not just in the story.

Western Kentucky is still the quiet corner of the state's bourbon map. Casey Jones and Jackson Purchase are working the same ground, and we have featured both. Old Terrell is betting the untapped part of Kentucky is exactly where the next chapter gets written.

Doors in downtown Paducah are the next milestone, inspections permitting.
What I keep coming back to is that they never tried to reinvent anything. They understood what was already there and built from it.
Anybody been out to Paducah lately? Curious what the bourbon scene feels like on the ground out there.

🥃 Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel Heritage Barrel — 100 ProofI picked this bottle up in Florida because, at least in Alabama...
09/03/2026

🥃 Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel Heritage Barrel — 100 Proof

I picked this bottle up in Florida because, at least in Alabama, you can’t count on finding one. Here it comes through allocated. In Florida, it was just sitting on a shelf.

Heritage Barrel starts with the familiar Jack Daniel’s mash bill — 80% corn, 12% malted barley and 8% rye — and goes through ten feet of sugar maple charcoal. The difference is in the barrel: heavy toast, light char, and aging high in the barrelhouse for at least seven years.

And it definitely drinks differently.

👃 Nose: Dark caramel, baking spice and toasted oak.

👅 Palate: Caramel leads before the spice and oak build, drying things out as it moves toward the finish.

🥃 Finish: Dry, with dehydrated banana chip and a slightly bitter walnut note. That banana-chip character is probably my favorite part of the pour.

Then, for reasons I really can’t defend, I let the bottle sit for months even though I can’t simply walk into an Alabama store and replace it.

September seemed like the right time to fix that.

Jack Daniel’s celebrates Jack’s birthday throughout September because nobody actually knows his exact birth date. And after becoming a Tennessee Squire in July, I’m heading to Lynchburg this weekend to finally stand on my one square inch of Tennessee soil.

So there may be a little more Jack Daniel’s content coming. 🥃

Have you tried Heritage Barrel? And what bottle have you had to leave your home state to find?

🥃 I put a Charleston bourbon and a 144.6 proof North Carolina rye in the same glass and they never actually blended. The...
09/01/2026

🥃 I put a Charleston bourbon and a 144.6 proof North Carolina rye in the same glass and they never actually blended. They took turns.

Here is what went in the glass. Striped Pig Single Barrel 71, 8 years old, 128 proof, mash bill 70 corn, 21 rye, 9 malted barley. Broad Branch Rye Fidelity Barrel 146, 8 years and 234 days, 144.6 proof, 100 percent rye, Brewtally Honest Bourbon pick. Thirty milliliters of each, which lands the pour at 136.3.

The grain is the part worth sitting with. Pour a bourbon and a 100 percent rye even and the glass comes out 35 percent corn, 60.5 percent rye, 4.5 percent malted barley. You do not get a bourbon with some rye in it. You get a rye whiskey.

First sip came back astringent enough that I set it down, so I put seven eyedropper drops of Old Limestone into what was left. Seven drops is about a third of a milliliter. Into 58 it moves 136.3 down to roughly 135.5, which is less than a proof point, which is nothing. It fixed it anyway. I am not going to pretend the proof did that, because the proof did not move.

The nose is all bourbon. Not mostly. All. Toasted marshmallow and barrel char, then baking spice and dark chocolate underneath. Sixty and a half percent of that glass is rye and I could not find any of it with my nose.

The palate starts the same way. Stupidly creamy, chewy from the front, smooth caramel underneath. And then rye, and not gradually. Mint first, the way Barrel 146 does it on its own, with black and white pepper coming in behind. The mouthfeel goes astringent and creamy at the same time, which those two are not supposed to do.

The finish is oversteeped black tea and unsweet mint, and it does not end. That one comes with an instruction. Keep breathing through your nose and it stays put. The second you breathe in and out through your mouth it starts fading, which is your own breath pulling it up the back of your throat and spending it. On this pour you can switch it on and off.

So the shape of the thing is a handoff. Charleston owns the nose and the front. Winston-Salem takes it in the middle and owns everything after. The mint runs almost exactly like it does in Barrel 146 alone, which tells me the bourbon was never going to flatten it and never tried. The one thing it did change was the tea. On its own that finish is oversteeped green tea. Here it is black.

Honest verdict: I like both bottles better on their own. I also think if I found this as a bottle on a shelf I would be thrilled with it, and that with some work on the ratio it could probably be pushed past either parent. I am not going to do that. I like these two too much to spend any more of them finding out. I had to try it once.
Ninety minutes with two ounces and it kept getting better the whole way.

Anybody ever blended two bottles you loved and found out they would not actually combine?

🥃 I spent Part 1 of this trying to get rid of a bitter, drying finish. Part 2 taught me it was the only thing holding th...
08/30/2026

🥃 I spent Part 1 of this trying to get rid of a bitter, drying finish. Part 2 taught me it was the only thing holding the whiskey together.

Quick catch-up for anyone new. The Signature BlendZ is Old Grand-Dad 114, finished on three inches of heavy toast French oak spiral that I soaked a week in sorghum syrup and baked completely dry, then left in contact for a week. I liked it. Black coffee and dark chocolate on the finish, creamy the whole way through, and then a drying astringency right at the tail that shut it down before I was ready to let go of it. More oak was clearly the wrong lever, since the dryness was already telling me the wood was at its limit. So, water.

Four glasses. 15 mL each. One left alone at 114, the other three cut with Old Limestone Mixing Water to 109, 104 and 99, then all four sat a full thirty minutes before I put my nose near them. That rest is not me being precious. Nose a fresh cut and you get heat and disorder and a false read, and then you go make a decision off that read.

Here is how they landed, nose and palate scored separately out of five.

114 · nose 3, palate 3. All the heat and then some, with a bitter finish that keeps drying the palate out.

109 · nose 2.5, palate 4.5. The 104 profile with the volume turned way down. Everything rounded off and the composition loosened. My note to myself was that it needs more bitter, which is not a sentence I expected to write about this whiskey.

104 · nose 4.5, palate 4.6. Dark brown sugar sitting where the vanilla used to be, spice holding steady, to***co underneath all of it. And that off note hanging around every other glass finally has a name here. Bitter chocolate.

99 · nose 4, palate 3. Sweet oak, caramel and vanilla. Perfectly nice, and also the most generic this whiskey has ever smelled. I did not soak a spiral in syrup for a week to arrive at perfectly nice.

So it lives between 104 and 109, and 104 was leading today. Today is doing real work in that sentence.

But the number is not what I came away with. Watch what happens to that drying tail as the water goes in. At 114 it dries the palate out and reads like a flaw. Ten points down, the exact same thing reads as bitter chocolate. Five points further and it is gone, and the whiskey goes soft without it. I spent all of Part 1 calling that astringency the problem. It was the frame. Take it out and the sweetness has nothing left to push against.

One more thing I did not expect, and I am taking it into every experiment after this one. The nose and the palate do not peak in the same glass. On palate alone, 109 and 104 are a coin flip, 4.5 against 4.6, and I would have shrugged and taken either. On the nose it is 2.5 against 4.5. That is not close, and it decided the whole thing. If I had only tasted, I would have gotten this wrong.

Part 3 gets a narrower ladder. 104, 107 and 109. A five point step told me the neighborhood. It is not fine enough to give me the address.
Anybody else ever taken the bite out of a pour and found out you needed the bite?

Stop by BourbonBlenders dot Com if you have a chance 🥃

🥃 He built one of the biggest whiskey names in Cincinnati, and he never owned a still.Joseph Magnus came up with nothing...
08/29/2026

🥃 He built one of the biggest whiskey names in Cincinnati, and he never owned a still.

Joseph Magnus came up with nothing. His father was killed in the Civil War when he was six, and he went to work early. By the mid-1890s he had his own firm in Cincinnati, which was bourbon's other city back then, a river town with a whiskey row full of men who bought and blended instead of distilling.

He was one of them, and he was good at it. Around twenty brands to his name. The flagship was Murray Hill Club, and the advertising line was "a particular brand for particular people."

🔒 Then in 1918 he saw National Prohibition coming and simply pulled the plug. The law did not care that his whiskey was good and his dealing was straight. It erased him the same way it erased the men cutting cheap spirit with caramel and prune juice. Meanwhile George Remus, a lawyer in the very same city, was making himself the King of the Bootleggers off the same ban.

Here is the part I did not expect. In 1922, two years into the drought that ended his life's work, Magnus bought a stretch of Michigan lakeshore and handed it to the town of Petoskey as a public park. It is still there and it still carries his name. 🏖️ The whiskey man's monument turned out to be a beach.

The Blender's Trade, Part 6: Particular Brand, Particular People. Up now - link in comments.

When the law finally came down on the trade, it did not stop to sort the honest from the crooked. Should it have?

🥃 The whiskey that beat bourbon to Alabama was a single malt, and that was on purpose. In 2013, when every new American ...
08/15/2026

🥃 The whiskey that beat bourbon to Alabama was a single malt, and that was on purpose.

In 2013, when every new American craft distillery was chasing bourbon, Jimmy Sharp opened John Emerald in a former cotton warehouse in downtown Opelika and led with malted barley. The Sharp family history is Scottish, and as Jimmy puts it, you cannot study Scotland without studying Scotch. So instead of Kentucky, he went to Springbank in Campbeltown and learned a proper pot still. He came home working the way they work, with the grain pulled before fermentation and everything distilled twice. Almost nobody in American craft was doing either. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

What we found in Opelika goes further back than most ground to glass claims:

🌾 Calypso barley, bred out of an Auburn project to grow and malt in the Deep South, off one farm in north Alabama and one in south Tennessee
🔥 About a fifth of it smoked before it ferments, with peach and pecan wood instead of peat
☀️ Alabama heat that pushes spirit into wood fast, which is where his line about four years here doing the work of seven up north comes from
🍬 A rum agricole distilled from a quarter acre of cane he and three friends cut by hand, finishing by the light of their truck headlights

Almost every bottle carries a family name. There is a bottled in bond wheated bourbon on Bloody Butcher corn coming this fall, and a high malt rye already resting in barrel. And after all of it, the pour he reaches for at the end of the day is still the single malt he bet the place on. 🥃

Mrs. BlendZ and I made the two hour drive to taste it with him and hear how it happened. The full feature is live on the blog now.

Link in comments👇

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