Christmas Countdown 2020 #15: Old Tub Bottled-in-Bond

Distillery: Jim Beam

Region: Kentucky

Age: 4 Year.

ABV: 50.0%

Color: 1.4, Tawny. Un-Filtered.

Price: Sample courtesy of /u/goatfester

This is the 15th installment of this years’ Christmas Countdown. You can see the entire 2020 series here or the 2019 edition here.

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Nose: I’d let this sit out for 15-20 minutes before nosing this and there was still a ton of ethanol on first whiff. Once you get past the ethanol fumes, you get a lot of peanut dust. It’s like smelling an empty bag of peanuts. Some generic bourbon-y notes also pop in.

Palate: Two words: Nutter Butter. It tastes of those wonderful sugary peanut butter cookies that I need to never buy because I’ll eat an entire package in a sitting. It has the distinct flavor of creamy peanut butter. A bit of something sugary pops in as well.

Finish: Medium in length. A little bit of creaminess lingers but it’s mostly ethanol.

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Conclusion: If you like peanut butter, you’ll probably like this whisky. If you don’t, I’d stay far away from this. The famed Jim Beam peanut notes are here in full force and I personally love it. Once you get past the ethanol, it smells wonderfully of peanut dust. It tastes like a Nutter Butter cookie with all of it’s creamy, peanut-y goodness and that little bit of something sugary helps it along. The ethanol is a problem, I couldn’t get it to go away at all and it’s borderline unpleasant because of it but I suppose I shouldn’t expect a whole lot for $22. For what it is, it’s tasty enough.

Final Score: 73.

American Whiskey Review #81, Bourbon Review #63, Whisky Network Review #357

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Scoring Legend:

• 96-100: The perfect dram, nectar of the gods.
• 90-95: Near perfect, there is something truly special about this whisky.
• 85-89: Amazing, will always try to keep a bottle of this in my collection (if feasible).
• 80-84: Very Good, maybe only one minor nitpick about the whisky keeping it here.
• 75-79: Good, quite enjoyable to drink.
• 70-74: Solid, wouldn’t go out of my way to get it.
• 60-69: Meh, still drinkable.
• Below 59: If you have a bottle of this, start cooking with it instead.