Russell's Reserve Single Barrel Bourbon - "Flavie Flav"

Russell’s Reserve - Single Barrel Pick “Flavie Flav”

TASTING NOTES: Wild Turkey / Russell’s Reserve goodness with a distinct cherry note.

55% abv

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been part of the selection of THREE new private barrels from Russell’s Reserve, the much-sought after high-end single barrels from our friends at Wild Turkey, and have managed to secure an allocation of all three for our members. All three are aged 8 years, and when we went down to Kentucky to pick the barrels, the initial plan was we would have half Drammers (myself, Justin McKee who heads up Drammers Birmingham, and Bill Meyers from Drammers St. Louis), and the other half of the barrel picking crew was going to include none other than Flavien, the owner of the legendary Brandy Library whisky bar in NYC along with a couple of the whisky experts from his bar. But then, at the last minute (the night before), Flavien canceled. Now Flavien is a longtime close friend of the club, we’ve even hosted an event celebrating the release of a fictional whisky novel he wrote (!), so of course, we said no problem, we understand and we went ahead with the barrel picks of course without him.

BUT, naturally, we gave him non-stop shit for it all-weekend.

As part of that noble effort, we decided that we would create giant “tater” stickers featuring silly pictures of Flavien for the barrel picks. Initially that was just going to be two barrels — initially were going to be part of the selection of one barrel at Wild Turkey and one at Wilderness Trail. Then when we tried all the barrels at Wild Turkey, we fell in love with THREE of the barrels. They’re all 8 year Wild Turkey single barrels, but one had a distinct cherry note that we loved. Another had an unusual milky/creamy note that we couldn’t pass up, and the third had a delicious black tea / English Breakfast tea thing going on. So after much debate and hand-wringing, we started a discussion. Was there any world in which we could get an allocation of all 3 Russell’s barrels? It took some phone calls and a lot of promising, but in the end they made it work for us. UNREAL.

So, then we set to work creating the most ridiculous “tater” stickers that we could think of to give Flavien a hard time for bailing. We started sending pictures of him jumping out of a pile of marshmallows, him as Flavie Flav, as Ice Ice Baby, etc. Flavien started texting back, basically just saying “WTF?!?” so we knew we were on the right track. When he asked what the hell was going on, we just kept responding “If you were here if you were here”.

So, after well over 100 single barrel picks under our belt refusing to do bottle stickers, we have finally relented and created our first Drammers Tater stickers. One is called “Flavie-Flav” (the cherry one). One is “Ice Ice Flavie” (of course the milky/creamy one). And the other is “Mr. Tea”. Then (determined to use the marshmallow image somewhere), we called our single barrel of Wilderness Trail rye “Marshmallow Rainbow”.

They are all delicious and we hope you enjoy them as much as we do. :)