How to Become a Bourbon Celebrity

I don’t really know how to do that.  However, I did experience fifteen minutes of fame recently when the Neeley Family Distillery named one of their single barrel bourbons after me.  

Royce and Beka Sue have started naming some of their bourbon after friends of the distillery.  The first to be so honored were Neal and Melanie Robinson, when a fine high rye bourbon was called “The Ryebinsons.”  “Wheatlatch,” a wheated bourbon, named after yours truly, was the second.  Beka assures me there are more to come.

Not sure what I did to deserve this high honor other than drive three hours once a month or so from my home is west-central Ohio to the distillery and just hang out for a little while.  It’s a nice day out of the house, especially since I found a way to avoid driving through Cincinnati and meander along the north bank of the Ohio River before crossing over and dropping down into Sparta, Kentucky.  Nice scenery, wildlife aplenty and mom and pop liquor stores to visit along the way. 

I went back to the distillery right away to purchase a case of Wheatlatch and had the pleasure of personally bottling my namesake.  You see, the Wheatlatch barrel was chosen for the bottle-your-own-whiskey element of the NFD distillery experience.  Bottle, cork, label, and repeat eleven times.  Pretty cool, actually.

This particular offering was aged for thirty-one months in a thirty gallon barrel.  Running the numbers reveals that the yield of a vessel that size is about three hundred 375 ml bottles, although Beka assures me that after evaporation they get only 220-230 bottles.  So Wheatlatch, like all Neeley single barrel bourbon, is rare, and when it’s gone it’s gone.  And it is delicious, smooth, light and sweet.  I can’t give you better tasting notes than that because it’s really hard for me to verbalize what I taste, but that gets better with practice, which I do frequently.

And I even have the barrel with my name on it!  It graces my screened back porch as a piece of functional furniture and I am the envy of all the members of the Black Swamp Bourbon Society (BSBS).  The BSBS is the informal group of ne’er-do-wells I hang out with; they visit me from time to time and help keep my inventory of bourbon in check.  Fine lads all.

To hell with collecting Willet ryes, I collect Neeley single barrel bourbon!  Slainte!