I will never forget the moment that my friend Linda turned to my friend Bruce and said, “You know, when I first met you, I thought you were a real asshole.”
At this point in our internship, the three of us had become fast friends. That very lunch, in fact, we were laughing and telling jokes. But my god, you should have seen Bruce's smile drop right off of his face when he heard this. It was like someone strangled his mother right in front of him.
And Linda was not wrong, by the way! Bruce is a generous, caring, funny, and extremely intelligent guy who has found tremendous personal and professional success. I am privileged to know him. But like Linda, I too spent about an hour in a room with him back in college and wanted to jump out a window. I mean, the dude showed up in a writing class in which he wasn't enrolled and began to offer his opinions on the rest of our work. And by that, I mean he walked through the door as a friend of the instructor and proceeded to shit on people’s writing. It wasn't like he was older or published or anything else—like the rest of us, he hadn’t yet earned his BA. I and everyone else thought, “Who the fuck is this guy?”
I'm getting to the point with the McKenzie, I swear.
A number of very good, very readable, very trustworthy booze writers all gushed praise on the McKenzie as a bottle of bourbon that punched above its weight. Others with a palate distinguished enough to know what they were talking about said this was really the closest thing a drinker could get to Pappy Van Winkle. Not the new stuff, mind you: the juice that cemented the distillery's legacy as a top-flight producer of wheated bourbon. “Well, sign me up,” I thought.
“Forgive its initial brashness, because the McKenzie Bourbon is wholly unique among bourbons.”
Like my friend Bruce, the McKenzie bourbon made a terrible first impression. The first pour smelled like rocket fuel and the taste was initially bitter and chemical-heavy. Maybe it was just my palate. Maybe I'd eaten something weird before. Maybe I got a bad bottle. Whatever the case, before my first glass was done, I was running through a mental list of friends I could trade this with. I groused that it'd been some time since I'd given something a zero on the site, and this was most likely next on the chopping block.
But damned if each glass of the McKenzie didn’t get better and better. Not in some weird, Stockholm syndrome like way, but in a way where I began to appreciate what was being given to me, until my initial reservations seemed like far-off memories.
I've bitched time and time again that I think a lot of bourbon is samey. Maybe it was for that reason that I was knocked on my ass by something genuinely new. I don't know if it's the bottling process, the fact that McKenzie is made in New York as opposed to Kentucky, the addition of wheat as a secondary grain, or some combination of all of the above, but this is a unique taste among bourbons.
To me, the dominant way that wheat emerges in bourbon comes in the form of peanut. And peanut is all over the McKenzie experience. The nose is filled with the aroma of smashed, dusty stadium peanuts, and the development heads into a delightful combination of salted peanuts and peanut brittle.
Past that focusing taste, the bourbon is all over the place in the best of ways. There's a fresh mint flavor that intermittently cuts through the experience, along with some rather pronounced tropical fruits like guava and papaya. As it goes down, there's another bonanza of residual tastes including chocolate, pecan pie crust, and oyster crackers, of all things. The nose is a little musty, but you begin to see how that eventually hints at some of the drier, cracker-like ways the grain comes across as you sip it.
Water, by the way, is highly recommended to open this glass up. A small splash, or sipped over the rocks, and the McKenzie is just delightful stuff.
I'd add that with independent whiskies, everyone is trying to do what McKenzie is doing, and by that I mean a kind of punk rock, self-made, “if you don't like it, piss off” kind of vibe. Yet so few actually pull it off. From the initial experience, I thought I was dealing with another overly aggressive, also-ran kind of bourbon that's made outside of Kentucky and is really just some dude's side project to keep him busy after retiring from Microsoft or Oracle or whatever. I was so ready to put McKenzie in that same bucket, but time and experience proved me wrong.
That said, despite the avalanche of flavors—which, astoundingly, play nice with one another—the brashness that's part and parcel of the whiskey keeps it from being one of my favorites. Even as I near the end of the bottle, the McKenzie still smells like it came right off the still and wants to kick my ass. However: if you can look past that aspect, I think you'll be glad you got to know it.
