Life is full of those moments where we look at a new product on the market and think, “Hey: Nobody else is doing that!” Then we buy it and we realize, “Oh. That's why nobody was doing that.”
Case in point, the vermouth finish of Dad's Hat Pennsylvania Rye. On its face, it seems to make sense. One of the most common rye-based cocktails is the Manhattan, which consists of whiskey, red vermouth, bitters, and some kind of sweetener to taste (usually simple syrup, but you can add some Luxardo if you feel fancy). Why not just simplify things and age the whiskey in a used vermouth barrel, right?
Is this a good idea? I'll level with you: I bought this version of Dad's Hat to taste their proof of concept. Now that the bottle is depleted, I still don’t know one way or another whether vermouth finishing has potential. All I can say with certainty is that I don't like this bottle, so let's look at two possibilities of where something is going awry.
“I’m eerily suspicious that the vermouth finish applied to the Dad’s Hat Rye is a hard-charging gimmick.”
First, it could be the barrel seasoning itself. Vermouth can be funky, providing a strange herbal bitterness that broadsides you if you're expecting something sweet. In a true Manhattan, the vermouth provides a silky texture, some fruit flavor, and it knocks down the raw alcohol content of the base whiskey.
With the Dad’s Hat Vermouth Finish, you get the drawbacks of both cocktail ingredients with none of the synergy. The whiskey itself isn’t tempered or mellowed, and the weird and herbal vermouth tastes are amplified all out of proportion to the red wine flavors I wanted and expected. Even supposing that Dad’s Hat does taste like a Manhattan to you, it's going to be the booziest damn Manhattan you've ever had.
The second reason why I think the Dad’s Hat falls short of expectations is the more cynical (or perhaps the more unflinchingly realistic) take. This stuff is aged for nine months. That's it. The minimum aging time for even a bargain basement blended scotch is three years.
I've written before that when it comes to North American craft whiskies, you have to accept a lesser amount of aging at a higher price as a given. Even with that said—and as I strain the limits of my goodwill towards independent producers as a whole—I'm eerily suspicious that the vermouth finish here is a hard-charging gimmick. Is the novelty simply to distract from the experience of drinking an extremely aggressive and immature spirit? If so, not even a thick slathering of vermouth chases away the rough edges.
In one sense, the Dad’s Hat vermouth finish is true to that American indie whiskey philosophy that if a distiller can’t give you something well-aged and well-balanced, then it can at least give you something different and bold. Certainly, there's a lot going on here. There were some nice chocolate, cola, and jammy flavors that popped up as I sipped this. But somewhat perversely, those highlights also illustrate through juxtaposition how dry, bitter, and unpleasantly savory the actual rye is. Put the two together, and it turns into a veritable carnival of strange notes yelling at you intermittently.
I'll note that this is another review I sat on for a while as the bottle gathered dust in my cabinet. Dad's Hat is an outfit run by two brothers trying to honor their late father and his personality, so in some senses a hack job on this makes me feel about as good as kicking over a grave. But goddamn it: it's our hard-earned money, and even the products we want to support need to earn shelf space through intrinsic merit. If you’re going to pick up a bottle of the vermouth finished Dad’s Hat to support the little guy in his quest to unseat the big boys, I hope you like their experiment better than I did.
