As I sat down to write this post, I admittedly was riffing a bit off Buffalo Trace’s Weller “CYPB” and for those who don’t know, that acronym stands for “create your perfect bourbon.” That bottling came about through the collective review of over 100,000 entries into an online site that Buffalo Trace had stood up. A wheated bourbon was chosen and joined the Weller lineup as a perfect fit. Other choices included aging for eight years, placement on the top floor of the rickhouse and bottling just under 100-proof. Outside of developing your own personal specifications for what you’d like in your bourbon, patiently waiting years and hoping it turns out, there’s a fair bit of speculation involved in finding bourbons that you might like when you’re just picking something off the shelf.
At the end of the day, we all approach bourbon with a different palate – so what you like I may hate and vice versa. Admittedly, there’s not a lot of bourbons that I’ve downright hated, but certainly some I lean more towards than others. If you’re like me though when you hear someone say they taste something like cardamom in their bourbon, firstly I don’t even know what cardamom is besides being a spice and second reading a review of tasting notes doesn’t do much for me personally knowing how individualistic the bourbon drinking experience is. So, besides spending a fortune tasting through bottles or buying a snort of this or that at your local bar, there’s got to be an easier way to find stuff you’ll like right?
If you’re new to bourbon or even if you’ve been around for a bit like I have you’re certain to be struck by the sheer voluminous number of bourbons under various labels that are sitting on the shelves these days. In some ways there’s never been a better time to be a Bourboneur, but even I find it befuddling how many different brands and expressions I’ve not tried. It’s not hundreds of bottles either, there are thousands sitting out there that all have their own unique nuances. With this backdrop in mind, and our ethos of “helping the world become whiskey wise,” we set out to create a revolutionary new way to think about bourbon to help Bourboneur’s everywhere find a pour they’ll love through flavor intensity mapping.
There’s a whole science out there to unpackaging flavor, with things like spearmint being much more potent than let’s say anise. We’ve employed these scientific principles in defining the intensity of flavors to help our audience find pours they’ll love in our proprietary database of Bourbon Suggestions by Taste. We define a variety of flavor compounds which accompany bourbons from vanilla to cardamom, classified by the intensity of those flavors, and then crowdsource data from reviewers all over the web to analyze each bottle with some 450 bourbons mapped to date. Users are then able to drill into this data to select bourbons that may fit their unique taste preferences, listed by proof.
This type of mapping is incredibly impactful and is illustrative for some brands in which there exists tremendous variation in bottlings. This type of variation we’d talked about in a previous post highlighting the over twenty-some batches of Stagg Jr. (now just “Stagg”). Just because you enjoyed Batch 3, you may very well not at all appreciate Batch 17. Whereas Batch 3 draws on more spice notes, Batch 17 is significantly more fruit forward with a bit of earthiness. You’re almost guaranteed, however, to enjoy Batch 16 if you’re a fan of 3 as they share a lot of the same flavor characteristics. As you can see from the below graphic, there exists a fair bit of difference in the Stagg Jr./Stagg lineup.
With the average recent release of Stagg being around the two-hundred-dollar mark, and increasing with age to the earlier Stagg releases, this type of nuance is valuable to understand so you’re not throwing money into a bottle you won’t love nearly as much as the batch you just drank through.
So, you’ve decided you may want to get a Stagg Jr. Batch 17, now what? It’s not like these are just sitting on shelves, or any Stagg for that matter. You Google “Stagg Jr. Batch 17” and find a number of stupidly priced options, that may – or may not – be reputable and how much should you pay for one of these bottles anyways? Data matters and having up-to-date and reliable information to make informed decisions about buying, selling or trading coveted bottles of brownwater is critical. Although there’s a number of apps out there that provide pricing, it often is only the MSRP or provides a range of values that doesn’t reflect the reality of the market, which not surprisingly, changes regularly! As we highlighted in a recent post contrasting the data quality between multiple apps is quite revealing and underscores the value of what Bourboneur® provides with the Bourbon Blue Book® which is updated weekly and based on real sales of over 4,000 different bottles of coveted brownwater. The secondary market doesn’t stand still and neither do we in cataloguing and providing the web’s most accurate, reliable and up-to-date pricing.
Join our community of thousands by scrolling down and subscribing to our weekly email list – you can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and yes, even TikTok. Show us some love and give us a like on your favorite platform, or all of them and keep up with all the Bourboneur happenings! Also, don't forget to download the Bourboneur app and take us on the go to realize unparalleled access to secondary sales data, proprietary flavor intensity analyses to help you find pours you'll love, an interactive guide to help you dissect what it is that you're tasting in your dram, or the always fun "wheel of destiny" where you input your bottles and spin to let fate decide what you're drinking! The app does require a paid subscription, only $3 per month or$25 a year, which easily pays for itself. Cheers!
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