Sazerac 18

Researching a dissertation yields the prospect of spending successive evenings pouring over musty books to the ire of yourself and others. Conversely it can provide a fantastic excuse to indulge, evening after evening, in a glass or two of excellent whiskey. Accompanying successive nights of reading, note-taking and typing with the lilting tunes of Miles Davis and a glass of session whiskey can lead to a quiet, rather cultured form of alcoholism. If there is something that could be considered a session dram then the Sazerac 18 may be it… if it wasn’t for the £100 plus price tag for a single bottle. It is, perhaps, for the best that it is priced towards the upper extreme of what most people, including myself, would consider acceptable to spend on a bottle of whiskey because if it is drunk as a session whiskey the Sazerac 18 can prove dangerous to any remaining credit you hold with Father Time and your chosen banking institution. I shall try and explain through my experience why it is (rather sadly considering these small mitigating factors) the closest I have come to the perfect session whisky.

The first opening of a Sazerac 18 releases such a delicious smell that when we opened our first, and so far only bottle, I was reminded of a tour around a Caribbean rum distillery I had been on some six years previously. Part of the excursion at the Mount Gay Rum Distillery took the group through a room filled almost entirely with a gigantic wooden vat, its staves soaked in the ingredients of years of rum production. The humid air was saturated with the bewitching smells of raisin and molasses. Opening the bottle of Sazerac 18 reawakened this memory and I hoped against all hopes that this rye was as brilliant on the palate as it was on the nose.

A plethora of words can be used to describe the way this rye tastes: butterscotch, toffee, caramel, raisin, vanilla – indeed it does have some fantastically ‘rummy’ undertones. You will find these words thrown around rather overwhelmingly in most tastings of this rye but this bears no reflection on how the whiskey comes together on the palate. The sweeter tones are not overbearing, instead they are balanced by the more familiar notes of an exceptionally refined Kentucky rye: oak, leather and a hint of spice. This is to describe the interplay between the different flavors that my humble palate could detect, a more experienced taster would, I imagine, experience a luscious balance of rising and falling flavors that would prove to be even more enticing than to an amateur enthusiast such as myself.

In my experience consecutive tastings of a whisky always seem to fall, (by varying margins) slightly short of the experience, burnt into your memory of the first sip. The Sazerac 18 is a rare example of a whisky that quietly delights you as every sampling comes within a hairs breadth of replicating the first heady meeting. Each time you taste this rye you find yourself chasing another of its delicious components and then taking another sip to confirm what delicate hint of its ambrosial composition you had experienced.