Review: Southern Star White Whiskey, Bourbons, and Coffee Bourbon Cream Liqueur (2019)
Southern Distilling Company in Statesville, North Carolina is making a minor name for itself with its Southern Star whiskey products, most of which center around “grain to glass” craft-distilled bourbon. The company is also a contract distiller, and it doesn’t provide a whole lot of information about much of its operation (which appears to be…
Review: 2015 Nino Negri Sfursat “Carlo Negri” Sforzato di Valtellina
Per importer Frederick Wildman: Established in 1897, Nino Negri is the premier estate producing wine in the Valtellina DOCG in Italy’s Lombardy region. The estate specialty is Sfursat (“strained” or “forced”); a wine made from grapes harvested by trained pickers and dried for 100 days in the cool, dry, alpine air. This winemaking style combines…
Review: Bunnahabhain 12 Years Old and Moine Bordeaux Matured 2008
Today we turn our attention to two whiskies from Islay’s Bunnahabhain, including the 12 year old, the youngest age-statemented whisky in the Bunnahabhain core range, and the distillery’s Moine Bordeaux release, a special edition that dropped at the tail end of 2018. Thoughts follow. Bunnahabhain 12 Years Old – Matured in bourbon casks and finished in…
Review: Stone Enter Night, Tropic of Thunder, Sanctimonious, and ///Fear.Movie.Lions
Four new beers from Stone recently arrived, including both year-round releases and seasonal rarities — one a collaboration not with a brewery but rather a heavy metal band. Thoughts on everything tasted — all poured from cans of various sizes — follow. Stone Enter Night Pilsner – Metallica wasn’t happy just with its own whiskey,…
Review: Fabrizia Limoncello Cream Liqueur
We’ve previously reviewed Fabrizia Limoncello and other liqueurs from the brand, finding the spirit to be a perfectly acceptable example of this famous Italian liqueur. Now the brand is stretching its legs by imbuing the that same limoncello with real cream, making it the first limoncello cream liqueur I’ve encountered. (Fabrizia also now has its Italian Margarita…
Review: Warbringer Mesquite Smoked Southwest Bourbon
You’ll find Sespe Creek Distillery not in Arizona or New Mexico but in Oxnard, California, a somewhat unlikely locale for the most “southwestern” whiskey I’ve encountered in my life. (If Sespe Creek sounds familiar, it’s because it’s also the brand behind Dr. Zzyzx flavored vodkas we reviewed last year.) Warbringer is a heavily smoked bourbon,…
Review: Mr Black Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur
Described as “unlike anything else on the market,” Mr Black (no period) is a new coffee liqueur made with cold brew Arabica coffee and Australian wheat-based vodka. The big sell here is that coffee liqueurs tend to be incredibly sweet, but Mr Black uses “half the sugar and ten times the coffee of old-world liqueurs,” making…
Cocktails for Valentine’s Day 2019
February 14th deserves fourteen cocktails for you to celebrate Valentine’s Day with. Enjoy them — well, not all of them at once — whether or not you celebrate the occasion. A couple of these use infused ingredients so plan ahead accordingly. Others are easy-peasy for those of us who live on the go… and all…
