In recent years, Chris Morris and other United executives began to wonder if there wasn’t a better way to market the "odds and ends" of their vast holdings from distilleries no longer in operation. The result in the Rare Bourbons Collection.
The idea behind the Rare Bourbons is that a given stock of exceptional, highly aged whiskey will be named, bottled and sold until it is exhausted. When all of it is gone, that line will be discontinued. When all of the various rare bourbon stocks are gone, the whole project will end.
The first two bottlings in this series have just been released. Fewer than 2,400 bottles of each brand are available. The brands are Henry Clay Bourbon (16 years, 90.6 proof) and Joseph Finch Bourbon (15 years, 86.8 proof). At $80 a bottle, The Reader could only afford to review one, so we chose the Joseph Finch. Joseph S. Finch established his Pennsylvania distillery in 1856. His ancestors had been distillers back into colonial times. In 1924, Lewis Rosenstiel acquired the Finch distillery and merged it with his Schenley Products Company, another Pennsylvania distillery. Many other acquisitions followed, leading to the company we now know as United Distillers.
Unfortunately, that is the legacy of the Joseph Finch name, not of this whiskey. A complaint I have about this series is that the original distilleries are not identified. All that is revealed about the Joseph Finch bottling is that the whiskey is Kentucky Straight Bourbon, made with rye as its flavor grain, distilled in the Spring of 1981.
Now to the whiskey itself.
The color is copper, bright and clear as if buffed to a high gloss. It is very attractive, but not as dark as one might expect a 15-year-old bourbon to be. In the nose of the undiluted spirit, I caught a scent of spicy Italian sausage, a pleasant but unexpected aroma. This is, perhaps, another way of saying that the nose is both spicy and rich, which would be expected of a long-aged bourbon with a lot of rye in the mash. A splash of water unlocked the aroma of fresh rye grass.
People who generally don’t like bourbon or who like it to be very mild should avoid Joseph Finch. It is very flavorful and assertive. The effects of the wood are apparent mostly in the fullness of the mouth feel. There is very little smoke, vanilla or caramel, tastes usually associated with long-aged whiskey.
Another way the age reveals itself is in the finish, which is very dry and clean. Smoke finally reveals itself a few seconds after the whiskey is swallowed.
The Rare Bourbons are intended for avid aficionados and those people probably will appreciate Joseph Finch. It is distinctive, with a rich and complex flavor, yet it is clearly a bourbon. This is probably not a whiskey you would want to drink everyday, but at $80 a bottle, and fewer than 2,400 available (2,399, since I have one), you probably couldn’t drink it that often anyway. Newcomers and people who drink their whiskey mixed with soft drinks should stay away. You wouldn’t like it and you should probably spend that money on shoes for your kids.
The package is very attractive and rich. The bottle is cork-finished, sealed with red wax, with a wax seal on its front label that announces its age. The parchment label is printed in blue and metallic copper. Each bottle is hand-numbered, wrapped in tissue, and packed in a heavy-duty cardboard box.
Joseph Finch Rare Bourbon Whiskey, 15 years old, 86.8 proof. ($79.99/750ml at Sam’s Liquors in Chicago).
Copyright © 1997, Charles Kendrick Cowdery, All Rights Reserved.
From The Bourbon Country Reader, Vol. 3, No. 4. June, 1997.
(July, 2001, Editor's Note: The Rare Bourbons experiment pretty much died when Guinness and Grand Metropolitan merged to form Diageo. The new company sold off all of its American Whiskey products except I.W. Harper and George Dickel. After Joseph Finch and Henry Clay, no new Rare Bourbons were released. However, at this time both products seem to still be available in the marketplace.)