A little background
After months of looking at an Old Forester Rye label on the TTB website and then reading about the new mash bill (65% Rye, 20% Malted Barley, and 15% Corn) it is finally time to try out the new offering from Brown-Foreman. It has a retail price of around $25 and comes in at 100⁰.
(Tasted neat from a Glencairn.)
Color in the glass
Light Amber
Nose
Vanilla, wintergreen, spearmint, barley sugar, and sorghum.
Palate
Starts very sweet with malted barley and vanilla. The rye spice shows up again as fresh wintergreen and spearmint (gum, candy, maybe somewhat like Listerine).
Finish
The “fresh” sensation from the palate continues and eventually fades to brown sugar.
In closing
I was expecting a little more rye spice given the mash bill but was still impressed with its interesting flavors. Over the last few months I have found that my palate is sensitive to malted barley and it becomes a dominate flavor in any whisk(e)y that contains a decent amount of it in the mash bill, and that is the case here as well. Those flavors seemed to morph the rye spice into a wintergreen/spearmint gum freshness that I have not experienced with other ryes and that alone makes this a must have in my liquor cabinet.
Old Forester Rye
100 Proof
The Good
- Price
- Availability
- Interesting Profile
The Bad
- Hint of Youth
Complexity
7.5
Nose
8
Palate
7.5
Finish
7
Value
8.5
Interesting note here: the distillers made a LOT of this for the initial run, and are apparently putting some down for aging as well. This has been a consistently good pour over several bottles now, and should remain so in the near term. Big personal pet peeve is batch-to-batch inconsistency for big name ryes and whiskeys; one bottle is great and the next one is paint thinner. So far the Old Forester group has been keeping that in mind, and this a go-to rye now, with the hint of mint and cherry cough drops I always seem to get from this rye. Great price and easy to find too. Cannot seem to find Sazerac Rye at all anymore, and Rittenhouse Bottled in Bond suffers from the above consistency issues.