Saturday, July 10, 2010

Bourbon, Straight by Charles K. Cowdery

Book review

One day, when I was doing my daily tour of whisk(e)ywebpages, there were a guest poster on WDJK, Chuck Cowdery was explaining bourbon regulations 101

I thought it was a fine article, followed up by a string of questions which were answered !

http://www.whatdoesjohnknow.com/2010/06/11/guest-blog-chuck-cowdery-on-those-confusing-bourbon-regulations/

This made me purchase the book!. I found the book quite messy in the way the chapters were organised. I think this origins from the fact that I am (very) used to read books about scottish distilleries. Distilleries.
 That's is the keyword. When dealing with scottish malt whisky the focus is on distilleries. Here theres a lot less focus on distilleries, but more focus on people, history and brands
This book doesn't contain any photos at all. Not a lot of effort has (deliberately?) been put on appearance. This is the kind of book that has been published by a small publishing comnpany for a small cost. But what you don't get in appearance, you get in content. Chuck Cowdery knows what he writes about, and he guides you around the people, the history, the brands, the distilleries, reviews bottles and guide you about which whiskeys to taste to get around the main examples of different bourbon types (you can't say bourbon without saying ryes, something you realise after reading this book)

This is from 2004 and might allready be about to be outdated. This is for a reason I don't want to complain about..The entusiast market has caught the attention of the american whiskey markets and the variety of bottlings has grown a lot the last few years.

But you get around all the "classic" brands and a bottling like George T Stagg is in the book as the first of these were out in 2002

Verdict : Highly recommended and a must have for anyone who wants to have a book collection to go along with their whisk(e)y collection

Buy the book here : http://cowdery.home.netcom.com/bourst.html

No comments:

Post a Comment