With Booker’s Bourbon, don’t just throw back a shot

Booker’s Bourbon is uncut and unfiltered. Or, as Booker Noe II, the legendary master distiller of Jim Beam who is the bourbon’s namesake, put it, it’s bourbon “straight from the barrel.”

Produced in small batches from a blend of barrels aged on the middle shelves within Jim Beam’s nine-story rack houses, the whiskey is distilled at a lower proof than the distillery’s other bourbons to derive more flavor from the spirit, and aged until Booker — or, later, his son Fred Noe — determined it had developed the right vanilla out of the barrel and the right warm finish.

Back in 1989, when Jim Beam first sold Booker’s Bourbon (Booker initially produced the whiskey as a Christmas gift for distributors and other friends), the notion of a premium bourbon comparable to a single-malt Scotch or cognac was ludicrous. The whiskey wasn’t like anything else and required some explanation.

“If you just throw it down, it’s not as pleasurable,” says Fred Noe, Beam’s master distiller.

Enjoying Booker’s means slowing down, taking the time to appreciate the spirit’s color and aroma. Adding a drop or two of water. Letting the bourbon sit on the tongue.

“Dad wanted to let people experience bourbon in a way no one had ever experienced who didn’t work in a distillery,” Fred Noe says. The idea, he says, was to let the consumer add water and/or ice to reduce the strength to however they wanted to drink it. “This is how we sample it, straight from the barrel without filtration. No one had tasted bourbon like that.”

Booker’s Bourbon brought the whiskey back to where it was 150 years or so ago, when people would bring a container to a distiller, head to the rack house where they could draw liquor out of barrel, and put it in the container and be charged 50 cents a quart.

Back then, the bourbon you got one week might not taste the same as the next, depending on discrepancies in the raw ingredients, the barrel’s location in a rack house, the time of year or a host of other factors.

Similarly, each batch of Booker’s, which is released about four or five times a year, is unique because it’s blended to taste.

For instance, the current release, Tommy’s Batch (named for longtime Jim Beam employee Tommy Crume), is a big, bold, henna-hued bourbon that features rich tobacco, oak and vanilla notes that meld with dried spice notes. It’s exceptional, although not quite as balanced as last year’s Off Your Rocker, which was an oilier bourbon with more pronounced sweet oak and vanilla notes.

A reviewer once wrote, “If Picasso sketched bourbon, it would look like Booker’s” and he was onto something. Like Booker’s, no two works of Picasso look quite the same, yet each is unmistakably a Picasso.