So, I picked an interesting hobby…

I don’t have a lot of vices. In fact, there’s next to none except for perhaps this one.

Bourbon.

I really like it. I’ll stop short of saying I “love” it, mainly because that would be incredibly weird and misplaced. But I do have an affinity for this particular whiskey, and that’s been there for a lot of years. I think I probably started gravitating toward it around 2006 when I discovered an affordable 8-year single-barrel bourbon. Evan Williams. The year on the bottle was 1998, and that jumped out at me because my daughter was born in June 1998. I figured I’d buy that bottle for about $23, and it would be my special toast to my baby girl each time I drank it. There were just a couple of problems. First, I liked this bourbon too much, and it was gone too quickly. And second, I couldn’t get another bottle of the 1998 Evan Williams.

I found that there was a lot of the next year’s single barrel available – the 1999 – so I got that and emptied it into my 1998 bottle. (I still have that bottle with me, and I still toast to my daughter from it.) But that was the start of my bourbon journey, and it’s built up until this day. But recently, my interest expanded almost exponentially. I won’t tell you how many bottles are in my collection, but there’s more than a few. And I’m getting a lot better at tasting the difference between one bourbon and another. I’ve taken a tour of a couple of distilleries (including Jack Daniels, which I do know is Tennessee Whiskey and not bourbon, but it’s pretty darned close) and I’m going on a Bourbon Trail trip with some friends in July.

In my pursuit of this hobby, I’ve started doing “blinds” of various bourbons, trying to discern which one is the best in a group. And because I’m a competitive sort, I’ve started doing this blinds in brackets, similar to what you’d see in the NCAA basketball tournament. When I started doing those, I just enjoyed the bourbon even though I also took notes about what I was tasting. But I’ve now decided to describe these blinds in writing, and this seemed to be the best place to do that.

If you don’t like bourbon, I’m sorry for taking up your time. Please feel free to skip these brackets, but I do hope you’ll read the other articles I post. But for those of you who enjoy bourbon (and its extremely close cousin, Tennessee Whiskey), I do hope that what I present to you will be of value and enjoyment. I lift a Glencairn to each of you and say, “Sláinte!”

About Douglas Blaine

Capnpen is a writer who was a newspaper and magazine journalist in a previous life. A college journalism major, he now works as an English teacher, but gets his writing fix by blogging about a variety of topics, including politics, religion, movies and television. When he's not working or blogging, Capnpen spends time with his family, plays a little golf (badly) and loves to learn about virtually anything.

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