Taste Test: Aging Whiskey in Japanese Oak Is Old Hat, But This New Bourbon Takes it to Another Level

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

I’ve written a lot about cask-finished whiskeys over the past few years, highlighting those that stand out for their finesse and tact, and others that should never be repeated (I’m looking at you, amburana). One type of cask finish that had a surge in popularity a few years ago, and has stuck around ever since, is Japanese mizunara oak. If you’re a whiskey fan, surely you’ve tried more than a few expressions that were partially matured in this type of wood, but one of the best in recent years just arrived in the form of Bardstown Bourbon Company‘s new Hokkaido Mizunara Oak expression.

For those who are not familiar, Bardstown Bourbon Company is a distillery located in the eponymous town that is the heart of bourbon country, a relatively new operation that was founded just over a decade ago. Since then, the distillery has become a go-to contract distiller for many different brands, making more than 50 different mashbills that it ages in its warehouses. Credit to the distillery for being pretty transparent about its process, at least as much as contracts allow–if you get a chance to visit, you can see charts detailing which brands are being produced on any given day on the walls of the stillhouse. The distillery also has its own brands, including the Origin Series of bourbon and rye that is produced in-house. But the best expressions you’ll find under the BBC umbrella are made up of sourced whiskeys from distilleries in different states that are blended and cask finished by master blender Dan Callaway, who is as much of a whiskey enthusiast as he is maker.

RELATED: 50 Greatest Bourbons of the 21st Century

In addition to the Discovery and Collaborative Series, there’s the Distillery Reserve line which includes the new Hokkaido release. Like virtually all of the BBC blends, the breakdown of this new whiskey is provided in detail: 47 percent 15-year-old Kentucky bourbon, 33 percent 14-year-old Kentucky bourbon, 15 percent 9-year-old Indiana bourbon, and 5 percent 18-year-old Tennessee bourbon (visit the website if you want to see the mashbills for each of these components). This blend was finished in six 66-gallon Japanese mizunara barrels for a total of 28 months—quite a long time to spend in this type of wood that is prone to leaks and considered to be a bit fickle. The barrels started out aging in the distillery’s warehouse H in a room that was built to hold larger barrels and has large temperature swings, then were transferred to the more temperate first floor of warehouse E to moderate.

The resulting whiskey is, simply put, spectacular, and really one of the better examples of a mizunara-finished whiskey I’ve tried. It’s bottled at cask strength of 109.3 proof, which is high but not overpowering. Mizunara is often said to bring notes of sandalwood, incense, and spice to a whiskey, and those are present here but softened and muted in a way that really lets the character of the bourbon shine through. And that character is intense and slightly sweet with a bouquet of flavors including caramel, rum raisin ice cream, creme brulee, and milk chocolate, all undercut with some citrus and spice.

It’s notable when a distillery or brand can take something that’s been done many times before, like a mizunara cask finish, and put its own unique spin on it. In this case, whether it’s due to the components in the blend, the proof, or the conditions in which the secondary maturation occurred—or all of the above, probably—Bardstown Bourbon Company’s Hokkaido expression truly stands out from the pack.

Score: 94