Whiskey Hotline Handpicked Sleepers - Barrel to Bottle Samples Hidden Gems

All right, how long is this episode going to be? For **** sake, Pat. It could take a while. You said 8 to 12 bottles, and you brought like 18 bottles. Well, we were going to bring 30. And Joe, and you brought Joe. We were going to bring a lot more. We left the other two boxes back at the office. Yeah, I got an even 20. Oh man. And not only that, but we have a relevant Q&A for this one that actually came. Oh, yeah. So we'll see if we get to that. Uh, yeah. We won't. What are you talking about? We're going to get to everything. Yeah. All right. So that said, we better start rolling. You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. In the room with me is Jenna. I also do communications for Binny's. And hey, it's Pat. I interrupt Jenna. And I'm Joe. I get interrupted by Pat. All the time, professionally on a daily basis. It has nothing to do with you personally, Jenna. It must be J names. Jenna, Joe. Yeah, that's it. Brett, Greg, Jeff. Everyone. I think it's only isolated to people who happen to be in the room with Pat. This is an unnecessary attack and has nothing to do with today's episode. Yeah. All right. So, what are we calling this? We're calling this Whiskey Hotline Handpicked Sleepers. Sure. Sure. You can call it that. So, I was sitting around in the office actually just this morning with Joe, and I mentioned that 80% of the time, I think, when a handpicked single barrel comes in, it's gone within like three weeks or so, sometimes four weeks. Producer Jim was waiting months for a handpicked bottle that he helped pick. He was at the distillery and he helped pick because he was the cameraman. Then like four months after it came and went, we were like, what happened to that? Pat's like, oh, that's long gone. We can't even get so many of these handpicks. Exactly. They come in and they go quickly. We do a lot of handpicked barrels, many hundreds a year. But there's always a few that for some reason or another tend to sit around. There's a lot of hidden gems to be found if you're willing to take a chance on a couple of these, I think. So I asked Joe this morning, I was like, do you think you could put together a list of handpicked casks that we have in stock that are sitting around that you think are really exciting? And he mentioned that that was kind of a poor way to word the question because for him, they all were exciting because otherwise we wouldn't have picked them and we wouldn't have put our name on them if we didn't find some next level kind of I have seen you guys turn down every sample given to you and choose not to pick something. Yeah, and that happens more often than you would think. That happened just last month. Yeah, it happened just last week, actually, too. There's some narrative out there online that like because Binny's does so many picks and we're so big that we don't actually pick our cast that it's just like what you would get at a grocery store where the master distiller just like picks a cast and That's kind of ridiculous. You guys are way too snooty. Way too snooty. Binny's has been doing this longer than like anybody else to my knowledge here. So we do taste every single barrel that comes through our doors. And so that means several thousand things a year, the vast majority of which got rejected. So we end up with a lot of really cool stuff. And sometimes there's a ton of it in the stores at once. So it can be a little overwhelming and some things just kind of slip out of public consciousness a bit, even if we email about it and post it on Instagram or whatever. And so we gathered up a bunch of stuff here that's in pretty good supply. I mean, Joe was looking at the list of stores. Some of them might only be in like 15, 20 stores, but they're all like very much worth tracking down and they're really interesting, delicious casts. So we're going to make you guys taste them all today. And I guess it's worth noting. There's, I mean, there's a treasure hunt element to this. This is cool. There is, but if anything we talk about on this podcast interests you, just email spirits at binnys.com and either myself or Joe or Brett will reply to that email and let you know what stores have this in stock and we'll get it. Or if you prefer to call, you can always call the 888-817-5898 number. The Whiskey Hotline itself. I have the map for the treasure. I know we're all the gold. We are not at our desks all the time and it was recently possibly revealed that I don't know how to check the voicemail. But it's also determined that you're not the only one. I think I'm the only one in the office that knows how to check. Yeah, the Whiskey Hotline operators named Joe are standing by. So, as I look at the ridiculous number of bottles that are on the table right here, there's something for everyone. I thought it would just be whiskeys, but you have Scotch and Irish and bourbon and an Armagnac and a rum. Two Armagnacs and two rums actually. Whatever that is, is that French? Yes, Armagnac is French. No, the one behind it. It's also Armagnac, also from France. Well, okay. I'm sorry, it was kind of moderate. We couldn't find our third bottle of Armagnac. It'll come up at some point. That's a shame. Well, we might as well scrap this and go home. But it was the one in the shortest supply anyway. There's two more Irish whiskeys over there too. Where do you guys want to start? Probably Irish whiskey, I think. Yeah. All right. This is Kilbeggan single grain Irish whiskey. This is a 16-year-old. This was a small batch whiskey. This was a blend of a couple barrels, thus explaining partly why we have so much of it around. But it's hard to beat for the price. I want to say the frontline price is what, Joe, 80 bucks or 90 bucks? Oh, I don't know. See, this is why we need Greg in his Binny's app to tell us the price of everything. Good game, you guys. Why would anyone ever install the Binny's app? Yeah. If I did have that Binny's app on my phone, I'm sure I could bring this up very easily. I don't know. I heard it was more invasive than TikTok is what I heard. Right? That there was like spyware. It's not online, man. Maybe that's why we haven't sold much of it. It's really not online? Okay. Jim, insert price here. I was actually going to ask in advance of this. Oh, man. Oh, my God. Why are these Shelf Turds? Because they're invisible. How dare you call them Shelf Turds? They're all hidden in back rooms. Hang on. It's got to be on there. Kilbeggin 16-year-old single grain select batch, KO521. I was right. This is a $90 bottle on sale right now for $75. $75 for a 16-year-old non-chill filtered whiskey. Pretty bang and deal. I would argue that's textbook single grain Irish. It's light, it's fruity, it shows a ton of bourbon barrel character. You know, homie's favorite, Lactone. It's a lot of toasted coconut, a lot of vanilla. Really kind of fat and easy drinking though. Partly thanks to that non-chill filtration, it's got a real nice round mouthfeel to it. Real soft and candied on the nose. Yeah. Pretty excellent whiskey. I mean, and for $75 to be able to pull out a 16-year-old whiskey when your brother-in-law who you don't want to pull out the pappy is over and be like, why? There's other really old awesome Irish whiskey, single select batch, it's very limited release. Here you go. Jenna, this is your white wine drinkers whiskey. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's like Viognier, it has like melanin, banana, and oily fruit. Definitely get that coconut chewy caramels. Yeah. We're going to take that as a compliment. Nothing here is a compliment. Well, in that case, we won't. Noted. That's $75 bucks, huh? Yeah. It's good. It's really good. All right, we're staying with Irish whiskey still. We have a Tealine Single Malt. This is a 15-year-old Irish Single Malt that was aged in Ambarana casks. This is cask strength, 58.2% alcohol. What's Ambarana cask? Oh, glad you asked. Ambarana is a Brazilian hardwood that is famously pungent, similar to my friend Joseph here. Yes, in a good way. It tends to have a lot of sweet cinnamon and sandalwoody, that floral woody tone to it. It is really intense. Normally, a distillery might keep for a Ambarana Finnish bourbon, for example, they might keep it in there for a couple of days if it's a new cask. This was in Ambarana for over four years. Oh, all right. I tasted this cask. Wait, it's the whoops all Ambarana? Well, wait till you see. It's surprisingly very integrated. At a couple of weeks, Ambarana totally takes over. But what this cask has shown us is that Ambarana can have a bit of a bell curve. Because I tasted this when it was two years old, two years in the cask. I looked at their master distiller. I was like, you're out of your damn mind. This is going to be way too much. I tasted it and I said, Sherry, this is way too much. Then we tasted it again two years later, and it had totally come back down to earth. It's got interesting layers. It's got, dare I say, nuance in an Ambarana cask. It's got a lot of interesting complexity. You still get the fruit from the Irish whiskey, but you get all these interesting wood notes. It's really good. It smells like peach cobbler with a lot of nutmeg on it. This smells amazing. But peach cobbler, the fruit is still there. That juicy, fleshy fruit that Irish whiskey is known for. Yeah, with a big scoop of ice cream and extra vanilla ice cream. It's just the funnest wood to finish in for me. It really is. I think the very first time we had an Ambarana was in a Whistle Pig. Yeah. I think that it finished for two weeks. Two weeks. It was so overpowered that we blended that Whistle Pig with a Peruvian rum cask finished Whistle Pig just to tone down the Ambarana. There's like a strawberry and cream element on the finish. And pears, like spicy pears. You're gonna want a new cup after this by the way. Not those Asian pears that are only for snap. Flavorless Asian pears. I like the cinnamon kind of all spice thing that comes in. It's really great though. So good. And it was like 120 bucks for a 15 year old cast-strain single malt. It's really interesting. Pretty banging deal. It is 120 bucks. Peach dum-dums. Peach dum-dums. Yeah, like the little dum-dum suckers you got at the bank. They have peach flavors, those? Yes. They have every flavor of those. I mean, I guess they do. At the bank, I think of it as getting it on the way out of Garcia's. So next up, we're staying with Irish whiskey, staying with tealine. We have two single pot still tealines. So single pot still, we've talked about before, the quintessential style of Irish whiskey made from a blend of malted and unmalted barley. Unmalted barley gives it kind of an oily mouthfeel and a rich spiciness. These are 50 percent malted, 50 percent unmalted. It is distilled three times. Tealine is a triple pot still system. We have a Virgin American oak cask and a Sherry cask. So I appreciate that they came pre-warmed from your car. You didn't have to bring that up. I'm glad that you assumed that it was from the car. No, she already complained about it once and I had to tell her what it is. Yeah, I'm doing my best Brophy impression today where I'm just going to complain about everything because everything sucks and I don't know why we're even here. These are both $84.99 on sale. Not bad. So they were $100. Yeah. Cool little 15% off for you right now. Virgin American oak means not ex-burban. Not ex-burban. Just straight up raw wood that they toasted lightly or whatever, brand new. Which normally we would say malt does not like that. Malt's a delicate grain and they would be easily overpowered by Virgin American oak. But maybe because we have some unmalted burly-ness in there, fighting back on it, it's really an interesting whiskey. What was the first one again? That's the Virgin American oak. Okay. The other one's cherry. There's some bite, some spice on your tongue after that one. Nice little butterscotch on the nose. And on the palate. There's a cherry quality. There is. A stone fruity, a red stone fruit thing. Yeah. Now compare that to the Sherry one. The Sherry is all that pretty classic fig candy, that dark dried fruit. That seems like a more intense dialed up Irish than I'm used to. Well, it's cast strength. Punchy. Cast strength and it's extra punchy too because it's a pot still. Your standard Irish whiskey is a blend of largely grain whiskey, a little bit of malt whiskey, maybe a little bit of pot still whiskey. They're designed to be soft and smooth as possible and highlight fruit. The Sherry cask is awesome. Yeah, it's really good. The fun thing on that American oak though for me is that the finish is still going. I haven't even gone on to the Sherry yet because the American oak is still just hanging out. It just doesn't leave. It's singing, man. It's really good. I prefer the Sherry. I think they're both interesting in their own unique way. I think that your candy lovers are going to like the Sherry more. I never get chocolate from Sherry, but there's a distinct cocoa powder dusting. Yeah. These are good. These are worth seeking out. They're hanging around. They're on sale. We have more casts from Teeling coming. I'm not sure if they're going to be here by the end of the year or not, but including another, we picked a whole Sherry Butt of a pot still that was made out of chestnut wood actually. A chestnut wood PX Sherry Butt. What? It's a PX Sherry Butt? It's a lair. They keep coming. Super cool because the chestnut oak finishes that we've had before seem to mimic some of the same nuances that happen with super-aged whiskies, in my opinion. Mean like that richness? That richness, leather, kind of- Oaky lairs. Yeah. Then to have that with the jammy PX is really fun. Kind of rounds the whole thing out. Yeah. We got a lot of cool stuff coming from Teeling. We actually went out. We were fortunate enough to go out there in the spring and picked a lot of really interesting casks. Well, you better get your sails on to make room on the shelf. Yeah. All right, listeners, scoop them up. Scoop them up. These are both great. I would say these are both Irish whiskies for bourbon drinkers. The Sherry is fun. I like the addition of the Sherry on the finish. Really kind of fattens and kind of softens it up a little bit. And Ambarana, not to be missed. I mean, that's getting a lot of hype from a couple of American distros using it. Huber Starlight, for example, is doing a lot with Ambarana casks. We have a couple of our own Ambarana casks at Starlight that we're doing a kind of a consecutive aging project with where we're going to have a one week finish, a three week finish, and then like a four month finish. And we're going to have them bottled and held. So, they're all three on the shelf at the same time. So, you can kind of see that progression with Ambarana for yourself. It's going to be pretty cool. But we're a ways off from that. I mean, that Cooperts just came into the distillery. Oh man. This is turning into a not just handpicked roundups, but a sneak peek. I really hope the Whiskey nerds are listening right now. Yeah, I hope so. Thanks for listening, Whiskey nerds. All right. But we should move on. You guys want to do some bourbon, I suppose? Yeah. All right. First thing we're going to taste is this came in maybe a month ago. You can still find it. This is a small batch from Pin Hook. Pin Hook's a small blender. They are a non-distiller producer. They are contract distilling at Castle & Key. They've gotten juice from other places as well, MGP, etc. This is a blend of four barrels distilled at Castle & Key. It is natural cast strength, 59.59% alcohol. We went down and we did a whole bunch of different blends before we landed on this one, right, Joe? Yeah. I had a blast doing this. Yeah. Some of the Castle & Key bourbon I've had so far has been pretty grain forward and dry is how I would describe it. A lot of people went really nuts for their first two releases from the distiller itself. I thought they were fine. I think this is exceptionally better. It's getting fruity. It's 60 bucks on the shelf. Yeah, 59.99. For 120 proof four-barrel blend of bourbon. Now, we have this in quantity because it's four-barrels blended together. We're moving through this stuff, but this is really, really good. If you're a bourbon lover who follows our handpicked program, you owe it to yourself to grab one of these. Yo, this is where it's at. Right here, this is fantastic. Although, it has some of the youthful herbaceous qualities that you get from younger bourbon, it has the fruit and caramel of a mid-range bourbon too. This is great. It's so good. Very good. Listeners, this is the pin hook with the yellow wax. There are different wax colors to note releases and stuff. If you see a pin hook with a yellow wax in your local Binny's, that's this one that we're talking about. I was going to mention I like the yellow wax. Yeah, that Kessel & Kee bourbon is really, it's just all starting to get really nice and fruity, chewy. It's like really, really exciting times for the stuff that's coming out of there. Joe, is this corn pudding? Because it seems more like corn meal dusting to me, like a grain silo kind of smell. I would not blow the corn pudding horn for this personally. There was a Rebel barrel that showed up this last week that definitely has corn pudding on the nose. This is more corn and fruit. Yeah, yeah. Wow, that's really good. 60 bucks, huh? 60 bucks, dude. And you don't have to know a secret handshake, correct? Just on the shelf? Knowing a secret handshake is always a bonus. I mean, yeah. I mean, everybody enjoys a good handshake. What if I shook your hand vestly? Okay, what the hell is this? We got some small barrel sample bottles, so bear with us here. This is a Jack Daniel's barrel. This just came in. Now, Jenna rightfully laughs. Jack Daniel's barrel, who cares? No, I was more or less laughing at the very tiny adorable bottle. The goofy little bottle with the printed taped on label. It's a sample. It's a barrel sample. This definitely crossed state lines when it shouldn't have. Yeah. Jack Daniel's gets overlooked by whiskey nerds and fairly or unfairly, I'll let you decide on that. Something that a whiskey nerd needs to pay attention to is some of these Jack single barrels, and especially the barrel proof ones. This is one of the regular ones, so this is 94 proof handpicked single barrel Jack Daniel's. This is on the shelf now. I want to say as of this morning, we had about 20 cases spread around the 45 stores, so there's not a ton of it out there. This is the barrel number that finishes 1519, so 2201519. Am I allowed to say I don't like it? You're allowed to say you don't like it. I don't like it. Yeah, but you're going to have to leave. You've just shown that you don't know what we're talking about. I think it shows some of the classic Jack Daniel's bubblegummy character, but it's got a much firmer oak balance to it than you normally see. Greg, I know his mind was blown when he got to go down to Jack Daniel's with us and do some barrel picks, and some of those are truly exceptional whiskies. So good. Yeah. I like the more fruitier styles. The fruit here is banana. It's this big, broad, low-lying, oily banana. Close to brown sugar on top of it. Brown sugar on a banana. Yeah. And what are these now? 65 bucks? Jack's single barrel. That sounds about right. I want to say they took a price increase. But it's around, not for long though. Let me Google it. Do we have these in our? We don't put these on our website. Yeah, no, that should be on the website. Yeah, that should be. More adorable bottles. Tennessee whiskeys can be divisive, you know. Yeah, I have, I definitely prefer Irish whisky out of the whole umbrella of bourbon and whisky. More, I lean more Irish than anything else. 54.99. Wow. If you can find it, which is around. They sell out really, really quick. They're just so good. All right, next up, we're going to try four quick ones in row here, all from LuxRow with a caveat. These are the LuxRow barrels that just hit our stores. We buy a lot of these at a time. So they tend to, I think, be a bit of an overwhelming selection for some customers. But one barrel at Cast Strength at 120 proof doesn't go to many of our stores. So we, so we buy a lot. So a couple of stores get, you know, all of them, but most stores get three or four of them. The first ones we're trying are Rebel Bourbon. These are both weeded mash bourbons, 20% wheat. That's the highest, one of the highest wheat percentages in the whole industry. So the inside secret here is that these are sourced from another distillery that has a home base in Bardstown on a particular heavenly hill. And if you're looking for some limited-release barrel proof weeded bourbon, this is the same stuff at the same age and about the same proof. And it's 50 bucks and it is widely available on the shelf at a Binny's near you. And you'd be a fool to pass this up. All right. I'll tell you the barrel number here on the one that we have on our glass is 765546, which was one of my favorites of this round. Yeah. Joseph pulled these samples. He pulled his favorites. So if you don't like them, talk to him. Yep. I'm available. 888-817-5898. That's the Joe dating line. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Yep. All right. It's $49.99. This used to be called Rebel Yell, but they took away one of the words so it wouldn't be associated with Antebellum South. Yeah. And yet they picked the wrong word to take away. It was the word Yell that had everybody bothered. I don't work for them. I don't know. You rebel scum. That was pretty good impersonation of that bit Star Wars character. It's just really wonderful. Chewy, easy. That's 125 proof that we're drinking. It's 120, I think, on the shelf. On the shelf, they all get bottled down to 120. We had a come to Jesus with them when we were down there just a few weeks ago about how they need to leave them at the natural cast. They're getting a lot of flak from a more educated consumer base saying, like, you can't call cast strength if they're all 120 proof and there's no rules about it. So now the TTB is going to start developing rules about it. So our very strong recommendation to them was to just don't cut them at all and you can get blanket label approval. You have to print a special label anyway each time with the accounts name. You might as well put a different proof on it each time too. Totally. Yeah. So we are, fingers crossed, the next round of Rebel and Ezra Barrels will be at actual full proof cast strength. Real deal cast strength. Which they're barely cut down now. Like all of the eight barrels we bought, they're between 122 and 125 proof. I mean, they're barely cut down. But is there an age on these? Like four years? These are about five years old. This is like a really well-rounded. Like this delivers a lot. This is 2017 Distillate from late summer 2017, and it was bottled recently. We get these often? We do a batch of these usually about three times a year. It depends on our allocation though. They had less barrels available for 2022 than they did in 2021. They might have less in 2023. We'll see. They're switching over to their own Distillate now. On the sneak peak train, the next round of picks we get at the end of this year, early next year, some of them will be their house-made Distillate from the Lux Rowe Distillery, which we tasted everything blind, and of our eight picks, we picked five of their own Distillate versus the sourced. Their Distillate was tasting better than the sourced goods. Will the customer have insight into which is which? Yes, we will include that in the reviews. So watch for that on the Whiskey Hotline page on binnys.com and in your email box at the Whiskey Hotline. But also, this is a really cool opportunity to buy the traditional heavenly distillery that we can't name, and then compare it to the new Distillate coming from this new production. Yo, this one is awesome. This is better than your other favorite, Joe. So great. I'll read the barrel number for you here. It's 778-4813. Wow, this is good. It's kind of perfumey on the nose, like old lady perfume. Well, that and there's a lot of caramel and a lot of cherry. The finish is longer here, which I really enjoy. Quite nice. The other thing to keep in mind too, is that the guy that is the distiller at this place, is also the same fellow that blends one of our most sought after fall allocated bourbons, blood oath. So they know what they're doing down there. Summer allocated bourbon. Oh, it's summer. It's when it comes in. Is there somebody named Lux? Why is it Lux code in Lux Row? Yes. The last name of the family is Lux. What a badass name. You'd be a Bond villain. Yeah. He owns the St. Louis Blues too. Oh. Oh. Huh. All right. So next up, we have two more from Lux Row. These are Ezra Brooks barrels. These are also ones that just came in. Also source distillate from that other distillery. These are rye mash bourbons though. So smaller content of rye, the exact same mashbill as a bourbon named after a famous pastor who may or may not have invented charring barrels. Oh, okay. Thank you. Did you say something, Greg? Yeah, something Greg. Did you say Lya Greg? I said Eli Greg. Oh, Eli Greg. Barrel proof single. So these are coming in at $49.99 also. Also, yep. And the barrel number on this one is 785-1151. And these are also 120 proof. I like that little kick, that little spice kick you get from the rye. It's good. It's like a popcorn butter quality here. I can see that for sure. These are deceptively soft for 120 proof. Yeah. Greg can get into some basement trouble with these. Basement trouble. I've been getting into old fashions because I ran out of vermouth. You're just drinking whiskey with a little sugar in it is what you're trying to tell us. And a couple of shakes of bitters. Caramel, toffee, apples, pears. The second one? Easy drinking. First one. Oh, first one. Joe, you got the barrel number on number 2 here. 7849788. And again, this is Ezra Brooks, the collection, Distillers Collection Cast Rank. It's not actually labeled Distillers Collection anymore, but good luck getting Brett to change the way he names things. Yeah. He likes to write out a little story in the title. He's convinced it helps us with our SEO. I think that was my fault, but I think I corrected him a couple of times over the last decade. You may not be listening to that correction. This is among those same lines though. It's very good. Oh yeah. I mean, they're obviously whiskies from the same brand. They are a little bit different. I would say this one's a little softer. Yeah. A little more of that round oak vanilla caramel type of thing. Yeah, definitely. A little butter toffee going on too. The spice spikes up at the end at the finish. That's real good. It's really good. I'm enjoying it. The roof of my mouth is numb. Yeah, it's the bourbon fatigue. Yeah, you're not cut out for this job. Yeah, we're just getting into it. This is the beginning. See, Jenna, this is the question. Do I like hot sauce in this kind of whiskey because I destroyed my palate? Yeah. Or do I like this kind of whiskey because I never had a palate to begin with? Yeah. I don't know. Do you know? I don't know. I think it's just like the destruction process. That's also possible. You know, like all little boys, I just want to tear things apart. Yeah. Ow, that hurts. I'll do it again. Ow. Yeah. Gross. You got to try this. That's exactly right. Well, you know what's not gross? The next whiskey you have to try. Ooh, nice segue. Lame. I've had better. All right. Well, let's try again. So, next one we're tasting, we're going to taste two barrels from Starlight Distillery at the Huber Farm there. These came in last month. They were larger barrels. So, there are still some cases floating around there. The first one is a bourbon finished in a white port cask. You got one of four of those in the world. Yeah. I don't know. There's not a lot of white port casks. There's not a lot there. The idea was we were going to have a white port and a red port together, bottled in the same month. Wires got crossed in the distributor ordering or something. The red port is coming soon. That tracks out. But the white port is in now. I think the regular port is here. It might be. It might have come in last week or something. This has been around for a few weeks now. I'm surprised it's still around because the complexity in the fruit character in this whiskey I think is truly stunning. It's not just apricots, but it's nectarines, and it's peach, and it's cherry, and it's fig, and it's plum, and there's raisin, and there's golden raisin. There's apple and pear. It's just like a whole produce section jammed into this whiskey. Where's Roger and Chris right now? Yeah, right. That's what's so exciting, I think, about these barrels that we have been getting from Huber, as a Starlight Distillery, is the layers of flavor that get added in with the finishes that they're doing. Truly special. Pretty, pretty incredible stuff. What's the bottling proof on this one, Joe? 109.4. Nice. That's natural cast strength. It's on the lower end, which is a pleasant surprise. Is that why, compared to the last couple that we tasted, this seems so graceful? I mean, it really is graceful, really delicate. I mean, it's a lot lower proof. Compared to the Irish. Well, that and the port. The port. The port really fattens everything out too and adds those darker fruits. This is a phenomenal bourbon. Truly phenomenal bourbon. It's really good. Yeah. So we have upped our amount of barrel picking at Huber from a couple of months to several a month. We were just down there a couple of weeks ago, and we picked the next six months worth of barrels. So those will get bottled off at an interesting schedule. But these two are in stores now, though. We knocked 10 bucks off of them. So they're on sale for $69.99. Pretty banging deal. That's a lot of flavor for $69.99. This one's a lot of fun. So this is the other Huber one. This is a bourbon finished in an apricot brandy barrel. And this is 110.2 proof. A starlight apricot brandy barrel, right? Not like a paramount apricot brandy barrel. Stellarosa apricot brandy barrel. I assume their own apricot brandy, yeah. You guys all say apricot. You don't say apricot. Apricot. Who does that? Who does that? Apricot. Is that a regional thing? Where does that come from? I'm not really sure. Joe, what do you say? I say both actually. Apricot. I haven't really made up my mind. That's even stranger. Just like dealer's choice depending on the conversation. I've never heard of apricot. You've never heard of apricot? Roger says apricot. Does he? Yeah. Yeah. But Roger says like aluminium and- But he goes, I think I say apricot. More often than not, I think I say apricot. Really? Yeah. Okay, how about the aunt or aunt? Aunt. I know I should say aunt, but I feel avoided to it. Pinky sticky. No, yeah. I don't. It's like saying turr instead of tor. What's turr? Oh, tour. Yeah. Right. Turr. Went on turr. Yeah. Went on tour. Now words don't mean anything. I went through that past the Rubicon of saying words don't mean anything. Let's talk about this whiskey though. Yeah. Because it's awesome. It's another lower proof, 110.2. Same price, 80 bucks, mark down to 70 right now. Buddy. It's so good. Oh, man. Initially, I thought, okay, pretty one note with this juicy apricot thing. It's so present. It's so present. But there is more to it than that, though. This is as advertised. It's almost like there's sweetness to it. Like weight because of the, like sugar because of the apricots. Like IHOP apricot syrup, like levels of apricot. Yeah. It's really fun, though. So I think this is kind of points out a little bit of what they have done there, at least with some of the barrels we've gotten. When we taste the bourbon, sometimes the apricot slash apricot, that note comes through. So why not heighten it with the apricot brandy? Same thing with when we taste the rye whiskey. Sometimes there's a beautiful citrus note that will show up in orange. And so we had one that was finished in Vino de Naranja barrels that really doubled down and highlighted the orange note. So I think that's just what these guys are doing here with a couple of these. They're doing a lot of real masterful stuff with their barrel finishing. And part of the key is, is there such a small operation, they're nimble enough to just take, oh, the barrel broker has one of these or six of these. You know, Diageo doesn't want that. Any of the other big distillers experimenting with barrel finishes doesn't want that. Like who else can take one white pork cask when it's fresh and available from a barrel broker besides some, besides an operation like this and turn into something truly cool. And the cool thing is they're not like, for them, it's just like experimenting. They just always want to create new stuff. So they're not marrying these barrels. They don't care. Like we can go down there and they're like literally any barrel that you want to taste that somebody hasn't already bought, you can buy. Like we don't care. Like if it's one we thought, oh, this would be great to sell in the gift shop. They don't care. They'll let us buy it. And the other thing, too, these finishes aren't gimmicks. You know, this is an additive part to the to the end experience. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. This one also is on sale for $69.99, which is phenomenal for something like this. Bourbon's done. Sorry, nerds. We're moving on awry. Next up is a real special one, near and dear to our hearts as Simpsons fans. This is an 18-year-old whistle pig named Sir Oinks-A-Lot. Spider Pig. Or was that a different one? No. Sir Oinks-A-Lot was the mascot at Springfield A&M University. When Homer goes back to college and then they like steal the mascot from their rival school, which was Springfield A&M. And then they get it back or whatever and they're like, that pig had powerful friends. Anyways, just this big fat pig. Are we getting Spider Pig? Do we have Spider Pig already? Possibly. Possibly. Has not been determined. We have not submitted names to the next round of Whistle Pig Barrels. I just figured out why we haven't sold any of this. It is laughably expensive. Peter Porker is also on the list. We have sold almost all of this. We have? This is a treasure worth seeking out. There are a few bottles left around the chain. That goes against the assignment that you gave yourself, which was things that weren't- Bringing you awesome to taste. Just taste this whiskey and appreciate it. All right. If you have $600 burning the hole in your pocket, find a Binny's that has this. Find a Sir Oinksalot. How much of this did you get? It smells like apples. Oh, it tastes like apples. Limestone. We got a whole case or a whole barrel. I mean, whatever was left. I want to say there was probably like 23, three bottle cases or something like that. But it's just a perfectly elegant, layered, rich, rye delight. Elegant is the right word. This is layered and it's obviously mature, but it's still light on its feet and it's not overtaken by oak and it's not dry. There's a lot going on in this whiskey if you want to sit here and unpack it and sip on it and think about it. This has a shockingly Venice quality with like, what was the cask? An American Oak barrel. It's just an oak. It has like, I don't know, like again, I'm like a V&A or an extraminer kind of fruit quality to it. The finish for me is like almost entirely like golden delicious apple. It has a grippiness on the palate that the others haven't shown. Would I be thinking this hard if it was $60 instead of $600? I don't know. So it's a malted rye, isn't it? Yeah. Of note with their 18-year-old is it's 79% rye, 15% malted rye, 16% malted barley. So they label it as double malt because it has two different malted grains in it. All right. Whistle Pig has it been around for 18 years. So is this like a Diageo thing? Is this like Crown Royal rye? Yeah. It's from somewhere else, yes. Somewhere in Canada. Most likely. What makes this $600 versus like some of their other items that are not? Rarity. Rarity, packaging, age. One makes anything $600. The sheer enthusiasm of the Whiskey Hotline. Yeah. And of Whistle Pig fans. Yeah, true. But I will tell you what. This isn't really just sitting around. This is just a special sample. We have this. You can go into maybe 20 different Binny's stores and they might have one bottle. We have it, but we don't have it. This is around. But I will say, there were enough whiskey enthusiasts out there who bought enough of this, so we have two more 18-year-olds coming this year. Oh, God. All right. I'm sure they'll be equally complex and interesting. Yeah. Really good though, right? Yeah, for sure. It's around and it's worth seeking out. So. It's very good. All right. You guys want to do Scotch next? Armagnac. Armagnac. Armagnac and then Scotch? How PD are the Scotch's? One's kind of PD. One's a tiny bit PD. Tiny, tiny bit PD. Is that like Whiskey Hotline tiny bit PD? Yeah. Normal person. You know, I think Joe's right. I think we ought to do the Armagnac next. All right. All right. So the first one we're doing is a Delord cask. This is a 12 year old 2009 vintage. Look at how adorable that bottle is. It is so adorable. This is 100 proof, which is natural cask strength for this Armagnac at the time. So I think a lot of people don't realize about Armagnac because it gets proofed down as it ages. So every year or every two years, it might get transferred from a new barrel to the next second use barrel, to the third, to the fourth, or whatever, because they don't want to overpower with oak. So every time they transfer barrels, they usually will aerate it and water it down about two alcohol percentages. So that's how you end up with a 21-year-old Armeniak, for example, that's a natural cast strength of 41 or 43% alcohol, because it's been watered down 2% every year, something like that. So this 12-year-old here is 50% alcohol. So there is no water added to this. This is just Armeniak, and there's no water added at bottling rather. But that really helps maintain the richness and the chewiness of a good Armeniak. It also is not only in a tiny sample bottle, but it has a real label. Leave it to the French. Yeah. They're like, we can't handle this. Spare no expense. Yeah. It's such a big shift of gears moving into Armeniak from all the bourbon and rye. Yeah, but there's some familiar friends here in Armeniak in the way of oak. True. And the boldness of the Armeniak spirit is not a soft, delicate thing. And it's not cognac. The fruit is dialed so much up by the person, obviously. It's so good. It's very tasty. Delord is one of our favorite producers. So Delord actually makes two labels. They make Delord and Marie Dufault. Dufault would be described as the gentler, kind of more floral side of what they make, where Delord is going to have bigger, bolder fruit and oak character, more earthiness. And that has to do with on the distillation technique. I believe so, yeah. Because they do have a pot still at Delord as well, which makes more of a cognac style distillate for the Marie Dufault, whereas this is in a more traditional Armiax still, which is like a single pass, very rudimentary column still. So a lot of fruit here. A ton of fruit. I mean, it's a brand. A lot of apple, a lot of pear, spice, cherry on top of that. And yeah, the fact that it's proofed down means that it's so easy going compared to a lot. This is a breather for your palate in this particular lineup. Yeah. 100 proof, it's 100 bucks. I want to say it's on sale right now for 90. Yep. So, it's around, we've sold probably half this cask. Armory Yaks casks are big. They're 450 liters, usually 400 liters or 450. So, there's a lot more bottles of this than your standard bourbon cask, but we still have them. It's worth seeking out. It was the first, we did a couple of casks of Armory Yak this past year and they were the first ones we had done in quite a while actually. So, we'll taste one of the others next. It's a weirdly modern and not at the same time bottle package here. A couple of things here. Next one we're going to try is from Len Cantata, which is a Negotiant brought in by PM Spirits. They got pretty hyped up by some bourbon guys a few years ago because they had really high proof natural cast strength Armagnacs, like this guy is 56% alcohol. So when this was aging, it wasn't proofed down as it was transferred between barrels, if it was transferred between barrels. So this is a 1998 vintage. It's distilled from Ouniblanque and Colambard. This is really strong and angular for an Armagnac. Len Cantata was famous again for kind of, in our opinion, they kind of catered to that bourbon crowd. They had really wood-forward, high-proof bourbons to the point where the first couple of rounds of samples we got from them, we just didn't, we sent them all back. It was this breaking case of emergency. Yeah, I guess. There's a wooden paddle on the bottle. They gotta justify the price, you know. Little pocket size one. Add decor to the bottle. Again, so French with this little coat of arms and the wax seal. Oh, there's one of those on the Lord bottle too. We have the sample bottle with us. So we re-rejected a lot of samples from these guys because they didn't taste like Arminiac and we were talking to somebody from the input and they were like, well, this is what people want. We're like, well, that's not what we want. When we buy a cask of Arminiac, we'd like a cask of Arminiac. I think Mr. Vontani actually like angrily said to them on the phone, like, send us an Arminiac that actually tastes like a brandy. Yeah, we have to be able to stand behind it. If we're gonna put our name on there. So, we got a few more samples and this one... Okay, a couple of things. It's 190 bucks, it's marked out 170 bucks. So that's some savings. This is from a Domain de Pouille cask, right? So Jenna, the other wine person is going, they're charging 190 bucks. No, no, it's not a Domain de Pouille cask. The Domain de Pouille is where it was distilled. Oh, okay. Because that's like a $10 wine. No, no, no. So- I mean, it's delicious. So if you look at a lot of the Armenian negotiance, they're sourced by area and field and family and farm and stuff like that. So- This one's really gorgeous. It's really gorgeous. And I love how much of that kind of apricot, nectarine kind of character it has. And that's Armenian. That's old Armenian. It's a little high proof, but at the same time, something we really love to brag about with a lot of our single barrels is we believe in selling you whiskey and not water, in this case Armenian and not water. I mean, you can prove this down yourself if it's a bit too hot for you. It's so spicy and it's so dominated by like graham cracker or some of the kind of baked goods. It's like a guava note that's actually hanging out. Yeah, totally. Yeah, kind of higher orange fruit flavors on the top of the palate. On the finish specifically, it kind of intensifies with the oak flowing underneath. Yeah, now that you say that, I'm thinking of the breadth, the foundation of the thing. But you're right, there's just fruit floating on top of it. Don't tell Roger or Chris, but I don't think I've ever had a guava before. I've never had the G in Pog. I might be there with you too. I don't think that we had a guava that one time, that we had the light cheese and the rambutans. I don't even know what it is. Oh, you haven't eaten a guava? No, I don't think so. I've had guava juice, but who knows when it's mixed with other stuff too. I think I drew one in college as a still life. From a Ween album cover? There was one cut open sitting in front of me and I had to draw it, but we didn't eat it because it was sitting out all day. Guava is, if I had to pick one note that I liked as a nice surprise to taste in a spirit, it's guava. The other two spots where I've tasted it and just lost my mind, was an old brook lotty bottling called Golder Still, which was for me the poor man's version of White Beaumont, which was- Getting pretty niche with these Scotch references, but I'm picking up what he's putting down. I'm nodding like I know what he's saying. He's essentially saying this $200 or $300 brook laddy tasted like a $6,000 bone whore. I Googled it. This is not even what I was picturing in my head. With this specific guava note that's in there. That was a pineapple. Both of them. Nice. Cool. Yeah, pretty good armagnac, right? Yes. Yeah. Yes, that's a very good armagnac. Worth seeking out. There's not a lot of other armagnacs like that readily available on the shelf considering the age and the proof and the price. All right. This is the fruit I was picturing in my head that I thought was guavo, but I don't know what that is. Oh, that's the one with those painful little black seeds. That's a papaya. Papaya. Okay. Well, I drew a papaya. Check out the fruit brains on Pat. Yeah, look at that. Check out the fruit brains on Pat. Are you guys chilling? That's all right, keep chilling. Something tells me we're done with the yak. Yeah, we're done with the yak. We're trying some rum next. We bought several casts from the Chairman's Reserve brand out of St. Lucia. Pretty legit brand. They used to be kind of all over the place as far as quality can go, and they were taking part in the typical rum practices, adding color, adding sugar, blending sources, blending ages, and calling it the higher age, that kind of stuff. And they've really kind of... Shenanigans. Shenanigans, you can call it. Way too many shenanigans. But they're like legit rum nerd focused stuff now. I don't know, it's getting a little dundery for me. It's that like creepy floorboard on a ship. Yeah, it's exactly how it sounds when the pirates took it out in the boat. Hang on, I'm looking at one quick thing on this still. That's rum? 15 years old. 15 years old? Yeah. Ex-Burban. Ex-Burban. 99.99 down to 85 bucks. This is distilled on the John Doerr 1 and Vindome Potsdell. We have a lot of these in the system. Chairmen's? Yeah. Yeah. I would not know that's rum blindfolded. Well, would you guess it? Probably more like scotch-y. It has like a smoky... Smoky, huh? Yeah. I don't know, maybe... Let me chase out of that fresh cup. It's really like overly ripe fruit estuary. Yeah, it's rotting bananas. It is. It's like banana leaf, I would call it. It's that... It's overripe banana mixed with a bit of a cane-y, vegetal note. Banana leaf? Where have you come across banana leaves? Big scary spider in there. Oh, no. Thank you. That was always the worry at the grocery store. When I worked at the grocery store, the poor people, folks that got working in the produce department, like, oh, we'll put you on banana duty. Oh, that sounds great. Like, no, it's tarantulas in there. I don't want that. No, thank you. No, thanks. I'm out. You guys rum... Wow. Delicious. Rum isn't quite for me. It's just like a little bit of this in a cocktail I would like, but it just... This is so good. It's not great though. You don't get rums like this every day. True 15-year-old rum, unadulterated rum, single barrel on the shelf, or you said I got on sale for 75 bucks right now. Pretty ridiculous. A lot of those tropical fruit qualities, the banana, there's like a cherry and then it gets like, I don't know, there's like a weird peach and then like a plastic kind of thing. I always get that. Well, there's like a fermented strawberry thing for me, but it's in a gooey caramel. 85 bucks. 85 bucks, sorry. With the leafy, with the leafy banana leaf. And like fig or like really heavy, you know, like, yeah, fig, big. Yeah, and banana leaf. I think I just haven't had enough like serious rums. I think I just only have ever had shitty rums because I just, you know. Yeah, well, it's the Wild West. They can just dump in sugar if they want. Yeah, I just did not, I didn't expect it to taste like that. Well, wait till you get to this next one because holy smokes. There's a reason I poured that one first. So the next one we have is, we actually did this cask a couple years ago and I can't believe we still have any left. This is going to be more of a treasure hunt, but holy cows, this works. This looks like it came off a pirate ship. This is a Trois Rivieres Rum Agricole. This is a 14-year-old single barrel that was aged in a Cognac cask, in a limousine oak Cognac cask, 2005 vintage, about a 48 point something percent. 140 bucks down to 120. Yeah, this actually seems a little more graceful. And for the rum nerds that are listening that want to go on a treasure hunt, I didn't bring the Batavia Adoc single barrels in PX, but there are some floating around still, including our own handpicked PX, which is pretty cool. Want to check those things out. This one's way smoother than the previous. Well, it's slower proof. Oh, well, yeah. Okay, that'll do it. It's older. Well, no, it's not older. It's younger. 14 year, sorry, versus 15. Fruit's more tamped down. There's more caramel. It's deeper, richer. Well, more French oak, I think. More French oak. For sure. But it's kind of taming the grassiness of the agricultural rum. Yeah. Now, Trois Revers isn't the most like pungent of agricoles to begin with, but this is a great rum. I mean, just a great rum. Jenny, you haven't been hanging out with Roger long enough. No, I have not. This seems to just keep coming up in episodes that are entirely about something else. What's that? Agricoles? Yeah, he pulls out some kind of funky rum for some reason. Yeah, agricoles so fun. Totally different than the rum that we tasted before, just because that whole category, you can get away with lots of shenanigans in rum, whereas agricoles, very specific as to what you can and cannot do. So, there's no added sugar to that. I cannot believe we're still tasting things. We're just getting started. There's another box in the hall. Oh my God. Boy. You're in for a treat when we go barrel picking in Kentucky in a few weeks. You are not prepared. No, I'm not. That's what we've learned today. You're not ready. And when they're like, we're going to go off for one more, drink water. Oh, yeah. I'm just bringing thermoses of water and a toothbrush. All right, on to Scotch. Scotchtown. We got a few Scotches to finish up with and we're done. Signatory. This is from the Scotchtown known as Pitlockery. Yes. So this was one of the last falls or was it last summer's signatory single malt Scotch barrel picks. We are still waiting on like this Springs. They got ax. They were bottled, sent to port on a boat. Everything was taken forever on the boats earlier in the pandemic. It landed in New Jersey. For some reason, the boat turned and went to Savannah, Georgia, and then it went to Florida or something. It supposedly was back in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago, so we're still waiting on our next round of signatory picks. We lost a boat. How do you lose a boat? Right? A cargo ship. This has happened before. Yeah. This isn't the first time. What? Either way, we're waiting on this year's signatory selections or last fall's bottled this year selections. We still haven't finalized our selections from this. Anyway, whatever. Man, this smells so good. This is Sauternes cask, right? What we have here, yes, is a 10-year-old Edredauer. Edredauer once was the smallest distiller in Scotland, still has the smallest stills in Scotland. Very short squat fat stills. It produces a big meaty, oily spirit. This is a 10-year, aged in a second fill Sauternes hogshead, so a 250-liter Sauternes cask, natural cask strength, 58.5% alcohol, 266 bottles in existence, and it's gone forever. Normally 160 bucks, right now it's yours for $1.40. And boy, does this smell like spray paint, you guys. It has- It's spray paint. It's like butter. Go back in there. I was going to say butterscotch. It has the Sauternes- You've got spray paint on your cup. Golden raisin and butter. Oh, butterscotch. Butterscotch. I get it now. Okay, sorry. I get it. I get it on Sauternes too. What's the noble rat? What's that called? The botrytis. I can never get over the high-end chemical shrill quality. I don't know why it's one of the things that sticks out to my palate, my stupid palate, and I get it on these scotches too every time. What dumb palate this guy has. Spray paint palate. Yeah, it's there. I'm still trying to ignore that. I'm just getting the butter and the fruit. Seriously? It's not as honeyed, so a couple of years before, we had an 11-year Ederdauer in a first fill Sauternes that was really honeyed. It was just all floral honey and golden raisin, and that was the prototypical Sauternes character. In a second fill, I think this lets the distillate do a little more talking. It's got more of that meaty, almost a tad sulfuric Ederdauer character, but it still has that kind of like honeyed fruit, that golden yellow fruit that you get out of a lot of Sauternes casks. And there's like some citrus with some like a pokey acidity in Sauternes also, along with the breath, and that pops here also, which could be like reinforcing the nature of the spirit. You know? Yeah. I don't get that like spraypainty quality on the nose, but I like I taste it. I smell strictly butter, butterscotch, but I can taste that plasticky. Also my nose is like shot after having COVID twice. I feel like I can barely smell anything anymore. Stop admitting that on the air. I'll never be a buyer. This one is a little bit older. This feels like a classic at this point. Right? And we still have this poking around a few of the stores. It's getting closed out at some stores for like under a hundred bucks. Whoa, that is a deal. A crazy deal. Because there's 17-year-old Ardbeg in there, isn't there? Holy smokes, you hear that, Scotch Nerds? Regularly 140, and I can't guarantee that it's whatever price Pat just said at your store. But it depends on the store. You can call the Whiskey Hotline and maybe I'll have you find it. Call the Whiskey Hotline at www.minimalespiritsandbinnings.com Where are you closing this bottle out? I want to drive there and buy a drink. The name of this episode should just be the number to the Whiskey Hotline. It has been plugged so many times. What is it? 888 something. There's a lot of eights in the number. There are. You're right. It's just all eights. 817-5898. I believe that spells out 888, Joe's mom. Classic. All right. We are tasting Compass Box Gold Standard. This is a blend that we put together with Compass Box for the 70th anniversary of Binny's. Now what? Like, this is 74. Okay. So yeah, four years ago. And I don't think it arrived in time, if that matters. It didn't. You're right. It did not arrive in time. And you know what? Sneak peek. There may be some really cool old, aged single malts coming for the next anniversary. Potentially, yes. Anyway, so Compass Box Gold Standard. This was a limited release blend. There were only 895 bottles on the planet. The vast majority of them have been sold and consumed by now. But you can still find it at a few Binny's stores. This is a huge amount of mid-teenage Klein Leash, which is known for waxy fruit. There's some late teenage Ardbeg in there. There's some 22-year-old Klein Leash and a Sherry Butt in there. This is a really, really banging blended Scotch. It once again highlights the grace and the complexity that can be achieved only through blending, because there's so much happening here. Can we just take a minute to appreciate how much Jenna hates this? I hate it. I am not a Scotch person. Oh, man. Dude, it's not even that smoky. It's more like iodine than it is smoke. Yeah, I know. Oh, it's so good. It's already rinsed in waxy fruit. Everything Pat said is in here, but there's more. There's so much more. Oh, I mean, I can tell it's well-crafted. It is a well-crafted spirit, for sure. I can tell that, but I just don't like how it tastes. This is everything you want in a good old Scotch whisky. There's old malt in Sherry. There's intermediate-aged malt in French oak and in Sherry. There's bourbon-aged stuff. There's a little bit of old smoke in there, most likely in bourbon barrels. It's everything you want in a good Scotch. It's really good. At worst, it's $140 or whatever it was. Yeah. It's Compass Box. How have Compass Box nerds not scooped this all up? They did. We sold this to a lot of Compass Box nerds from Europe. We're calling and trying to scoop it up and sending people in to pick it up for them. Local Compass Box nerds have scooped up. Most people who wanted this got a case of this. This is what's his name, Glazer, right? Yeah, John Glazer. John Glazer. This really like a combination of you and Brett and you know how, and his library and his blending art. It's a beautiful whiskey. It's terrific. Really cool, complete one-off, never going to happen again. All right, what's next, Whiskey? Hip raid. Really? Last thing actually, period. Thank God. Oh God. You can just leave now. It's a death march. I feel like we should have brought more. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like we should have. I feel like we should have made it a three-parter. Okay, so savvy listeners will know that my pick of the year, the year before last year, was a single-cast Highland Park 12-year-old first-fill European oak Sherry Butt. It was awesome. It was really good. It was pretty much everything I want in Scotch Whiskey because it's Highland Park. We have followed that up with an 11-year-old second-fill European oak Sherry Butt. I want to laugh every time, but. Refill Butt. Because I am a child. This is 65.2% alcohol. Because it's a big butt, there were 558 bottles. Again, I mentioned this earlier, this lets the distillate do a little more talking. This is tasting more what Highland Park is as a whiskey, and a little less what a cask does to a whiskey. You still get all the classic Sherry notes in there, all that dark dried fruit, all that figgy, jammy, raisiny thing. With cocoa powder and other candies on top. Yeah. Jenna, how are you making that face? This is so good. Oh, man. This is so good. This is not for me. This is delicious. I also swallowed it wrong, so I started to choke on it. This is unbelievable. And considering it's over 130 proof, this definitely qualifies as a Whiskey Hotline dangerously drinkable. You taste proof in here for sure. It's not like the proof is totally hidden. But if I were tasting this blind and guessing, I guess it's probably 118, 119 proof, maybe 120, not 130.4. I like that there's a little ribbon of jellied red berry riding on the top part of the cup. Love that ribbon. Great ribbon. Yeah. You're getting him excited. Well, he likes big butts. 170s down to 155. 155 bucks. I like the fancy lap. No doubt, that's expensive. But that's where these things are going. But that is where these things are going. We have a LaFroycast, we have a nine-year-old sneak peek. We got a single PX cask nine-year-old LaFroy coming. That's going to be about 200 bucks. Again, as a complete one-off kind of collector item type thing, I don't spend a lot of money on a lot of bottles because I get to try a lot of stuff at work. This is something where I bought two bottles of it. How have the Highland Park collectors not told you? Oh, they have. There's all kinds of nutty Danish people called the Whiskey Hotline looking for cases of this stuff. It's a lot better the second time I tasted it when I didn't choke on it, and I really enjoy the Finnish. Usually a helpful way to taste things. Step one in enjoying a quality scotch. The Finnish is great. I love the array of baking spices in the Finnish. It's not just like, I don't know what it is. It's nutmeg, it's clove, it's cinnamon, it's a little bit of anise, and then there's just like that classic peppery oak, I guess a French oak. They're saying European oak with a Sherry Butt. I guess it's usually Spanish or French. It could be Hungarian. It's probably French. It's like a fruit strudel. It's like a toaster strudel. I get chocolate covered Sherry. But that seems to diminish compared to what Pat is saying regarding the spice. You said cocoa powder initially. I think that's pretty prominent too. It's that powdery, drier chocolate. But what a great cask, man. And this is, maybe it didn't, like the first, the 12 year Highland Park, that was gone in like a month. And I think part of that is because the color was like dark like iced tea. Maybe this isn't as sexy of a dark color for a scotch, so maybe people aren't giving it a great chance, but don't sleep on this. This is an unbelievably good bottle. I will not be buying scotch unless it's sexy. It's usually how I go about my buying guide as well. I lost count. Was this 19? So many. I need to Uber home. That's why Jenna's spit cup wasn't leaking. I think it's 20. I think we tasted through 20 things. You're welcome. Wow. Yeah. Pat, bring a handful of things. That is. Don't ask me to pull a podcast out of my ass morning up next time, and this won't happen. And also, in Pat's defense, these aren't all full bottles. So if we put them all into, if we married them, he brought a handful of bottles. We just wanted to do that after this. All right. Thanks, Joe. Yeah. So listen, we tried 20, literally 20 Binny's Whiskey Hotline handpicked selections here. And these are the ones that we can talk about. There's a bunch more that we can't even market because they come and go so quick. But those are out, they hit. These are around. If you want to find these, these are around. They might not be at your local Binny's anymore, but they're at several though, at least. And if you're looking for stuff like this, just email us, spirits.binnys.com. And for a bunch of these, you're talking about the next batch that's coming in a month or two. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a constant supply of these. It's not like a grocery store where you slap the company logo on the side. You guys are literally out there tasting these samples, pulling these casks. Brett goes, you guys get to go sometimes, but Brett goes to Scotland and digs through archives of casks to find stuff. I have pictures of him crawling around on the floor with hundreds of sample bottles. It's a mess. It's probably why he likes your office to be such a pigsty. It does explain a lot, doesn't it? It does. It does. Increasingly, we can't talk about this stuff, and it's such a cool story to tell, and it's such a cool program, and this is just like a snapshot, you know, just a tiny sampling of everything that's going on, hand-picked casks. So f*** you guys, you got a better job than me. Yep. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I think you're right, but I do get to go taste the gasolinas later, so I'm pretty excited about that. Sweet. All right, well, thanks for bringing these two and a half cases of liquor samples. That brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, where we answer your question for a $20 Binny's gift card. Send your questions to comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social media, at Binny's Bev on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Our question this week comes in via email from Kim. Kim writes, I have a question for the Barrel to Bottle crew. Can light damage occur with spirits and liquor bottles? Actually, she writes, can light damage occur with spirits and liquor bottles? Sharing a photo from a competitor and curious if the light can damage these bottles in the alcohol selection right inside the windows. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Here's the pic. It is a picture of a store, one of our competitors that just has a whole wall of windows. A grocery category competitor. The side of the building is glass and there are liquor shelves basically pressed up against the glass window. So one note on the windows. If they did their due diligence, they would have had UV filters put on that glass. That doesn't change necessarily the color or the opacity of the glass. For example, we have those on the windows in our Oakbrook store that keep UV light out of our wine department. We have the wine department is very close to some large windows there at Oakbrook. We're advocates of that anywhere. We have large windows shining and on potentially spoilable products. So wine is definitely a problem and beer is definitely a problem. Beer is a hundred percent a problem. It can still be a problem with spirits. Like other things with spirits, it happens on a slower, less detectable level. The bigger concern with spirits is keeping things out of heat. The best advice is to always store liquor in a cool, dry place. It's more so like a destabilizing agent for certain colorings, for example, like some neon colored liqueur might change color slightly if it's exposed to UV light for a prolonged period of time, something like that. Or a red absinthe that goes clear. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's one that comes to mind for me. Yeah. We had a red absinthe back in the day where the color would kind of drop out of it. Multiple ones. Yeah. So it's just coloring with spirits can be delicate. I'll say that depending on the spirit. But generally speaking, you want to keep your stuff out of sunlight. If it's from a competitor like that where a whole liquor department is pushed up against giant windows, you would hope that they have the correct filter skin or what do you call it? Like layers, some kind of protectant on the windows. You got to murder out the side of that grocery store. Yeah. So yeah, it's going to look like an SUV. Yeah. At home, don't keep your liquor in a window sill in a store. Hopefully the store is taking the correct and appropriate measures to protect the product that they are asking for your hard-earned dollars for. Yeah. And we do our best to keep our bottles protected in stores. Yeah, for sure. If you ever somehow get a compromised bottle from one of our stores, just bring it back. We stand by anything we sell. Totally. Thanks, Kim. Thanks, Kim. Thanks for the question. $20 Binny's gift card coming to you, everybody else. As you already know, email your questions to us at comments.binny.com or at Binny's Bev, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Glassdoor. Well, thanks for bringing all this liquor. It's always fun when you show up. Joe, thanks for making the trek out of city limits. Yeah, good to see you, Joe. Thanks for having me. I'm glad that they let me show up. We need more Joe episodes. All right. Pat, I think you're overdue to get Joe back into his hole. Pat, keep working the phones, buddy. Yeah. Thanks. What was that number? 888-817-5898. That's the number. No, we don't have any Blanton's. Cool. Thanks for listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Back in your feed next week with something fun. Until then, I'm Greg. I'm Jenna. I'm Pat. And I'm Joe. Keep tasting. Sherry Butt, Chestnut Wood, Sherry Butt, a Chestnut Wood PX Sherry Butt, European Oak Sherry Butt, European Oak Sherry Butt. I want to laugh every time Butt is said. Refill Butt, because I am a child. Big Butt, well, he likes big butts. Sherry Butt.