Mistakes We Make: Saz Education
Learning curves seem to be a part of almost everything. Even the every day basics of life- things we typically take for granted - we still had to learn how to do. Walking. Driving. Reading. Talking. All these are things that at some point in our past we couldn’t do, but are things we do today without thinking. The talking thing…some people do that a LOT without the thinking thing.
The same is true in Bourbon. What we know now (whether that be a little or a lot), we didn’t know then. We didn’t know the 51%corn rule. We didn’t know what a “tater” was, even though we may have been one. There was even a time when we didn’t know who Jimmy Russel is! While we all have been “newbies”, thankfully, we learn and we grow. Sometimes we learn from friends or by reading articles (such as the awesome ones found at The Whiskey Corner). Sometimes, however, we learn the hard way. We learn by the mistakes we make.
We’ll revisit this topic from time to time as The Whiskey Corner team will share with you some of the mistakes we have made along the way. Maybe this will help you learn from our missteps. Or maybe you’ll laugh with us as we come clean about some of the dopey things we’ve done. Or maybe it will be just me writing a lot of articles on this topic. Regardless, hopefully, this will help us all remember to be patient with the Bourbon newbies. We were all there once…even Jimmy Russell.
This is “Baby Saz”. Not part of BTAC!
Saz Education
I got into Bourbon fairly late, maybe six years ago (and let’s generously say I am “early-50’s” now). I didn’t go from crawl to walk to run with Bourbon. I went from crawl to sprint to sprint a marathon with it. This enthusiastic, but ill-advised, process led to more than one or two stumbles along the way. One that I’ll share with you today involves BTAC and Sazerac Rye. At the time I referred to BTAC as “THE Buffalo Trace Antique Collection” (no apologies to THE Ohio State University). Anytime you hear someone refer to it as “THE Buffalo Trace Antique Collection” and not simply “BTAC", you know they probably don’t know what they are doing. They don’t even know the lingo.
I knew that THE Buffalo Trace Antique Collection was a thing. And I knew that Sazerac Rye was one of the bottles in that collection. Unfortunately, that was all I knew. I didn’t know what the bottle looked like. I didn’t know what the suggested retail price was. I literally knew nothing else other than the fact that the bottles were hard to find.
One Saturday morning I visited a liquor store that I had not been to before. Sitting on the shelf staring me in the eyeballs was a bottle of Sazerac Rye. Not just “a” bottle of Sazerac Rye, but I had stumbled upon an entire row (six bottles) of Sazerac Rye. I thought the greatness of this discovery made Magellan look like the captain of S.S. Minnow.
The is Sazerac 18. This is part of BTAC!
I still had doubts about my good fortune, so I asked the store owner, “This is Sazerac Rye, right?”. “Yes, it is”, he replied.
“Sazerac Rye is part of THE Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, right?”, I asked. “Yes, Sazerac Rye is part of THE Buffalo Trace Antique Collection”, said the store owner. He kind of snickered when he said it. At the time I thought maybe he was laughing at me because I asked a question about something that any real Bourbon fan should know. In hindsight he was laughing at me because: 1. I was calling it “THE Buffalo Trace Antique Collection”, and 2. He knew he had a sucker.
I quickly gathered up four of the bottles and left two, thinking that it would be bad “Bourbon Karma” to be greedy. I carefully carried the bottles to the register noticing that the little orange price sticker on the top of each cork matched the price posted at the shelf: $44.99. As I placed the bottles on the counter I commented “I had heard these weren’t too expensive, they were just hard to find”. He just smiled a little broader, swiped my credit card and wished me a nice day. My thought was “how could it get any better than this”?!
I gently placed my treasure in the passenger seat of my car and considered using the seat belt to secure them but decided that might be too silly (then I did it anyway). After climbing in the car I texted a few friends telling them “I FOUND SAZERAC RYE! TWO BOTTLES LEFT.” One asks where I found it. Another asks how much the bottles are. I share the store name and location. The response was a frowny-face emoji. Then, I share how much I paid. The response was a laughing emoji…you know the one with the tears coming out of its eyes.
They explain that what I had found was “Baby Saz”. This was a surprise as I didn’t even know Saz was pregnant. It was also a surprise as I didn’t know what that was.
So, here are the things I learned in Saz Ed 101:
If you’re not a newb, it is called “BTAC”.
Baby Saz (a 4 - 6 year aged rye) is not the same as Sazerac 18 (an 18 year-old rye that is part of BTAC).
Be careful of which store owners you trust. Most are reputable and wonderful people. A very few are deceivers and profiteers.
I hope you enjoyed this article. We’ll look to do more like it in the future. While we’re talking about “newbies”, The Bourbon Daily had a recent episode on “What Should Newbies Know”. They didn’t cover Saz Education on the episode, but if you liked this post, then you’ll enjoy that episode which you can find here.
Finally, remember to keep learning. Mistakes happen. We all make them sometime, even Jimmy Russell (maybe…once).
