9. December Black Maple Hill

I bought a couple of bourbons last weekend from the danish online site whisky.dk and they added a sample of Black Maple Hill 47.5% in the box. I am spending December cleaning out some of my samples and this one I am actually a bit excited about as I have never tried Black Maple Hill before (at least not in a state remembering it).  So thanks for the sample! I look forward to tasting it.

Black Maple Hill is a brand of bourbon. It's not a distillery. The bottler has sourced the whiskey from a couple of places, but the last many years it was sourced from KBD Kentucky Bourbon Distillers, who themselves source whisky from other distilleries. But they do it big scale, and they have recently (2012) reopened their Willet Distillery in Bardstown. Rumours generally agree that most of whisky sourced by KBD is from Heaven Hill, their next door neighbour. According to their staff they have actually been going into other distilleries and using their equipment to distill their own spirit. They do have their own warehouses, plenty of them actually

KBD Warehouses in Bardstown, Kentucky

This is clearly a high rye bourbon. No doubt about it. Huge impact of minty spicy flavours on a soft creamy bed of vanilla and butterscotch. The mint is huge. I have always been a mint fan. This is like eating mint throat bonbons.It's a NAS bourbon but this juice surely has got some years on it's back, closer to 10 than 6 would be my verdict from the flavours - A really nice and distinctive bourbon

Rating 88/100

This doesnt taste like anything I have tried from Heaven Hill, so I wonder if it's from that distillery. It reminds me more of Wild Turkey or Four Roses. Being new to bourbon I wont cast any verdicts, and who knows what HH makes I havent tasted ?