I offer a challenge: if you’ve ever suspected that all whiskey tastes the same, pour the whiskey you usually order in one glass and pour Seagram's 7 into another glass. It will cost you a grand total of two dollars at your nearest liquor store to pick up a 50ml mini for this experiment.
The reason I suggest this is that you will quickly learn what the bottom of the barrel tastes like. Seagram's 7 is stunningly, affectingly bad. Its only real value, strangely, is to serve as horrible reminder of what an outright bad whiskey tastes like just so you have that experience in your back pocket.
“Maybe if I live long enough, I’ll have a worse whiskey than Seagram’s 7, but it’s hard to even imagine what that would be like.”
First, bad spirits do not smell good. If you're dedicated to trying to find something that's a pleasant aroma in a pour of Seagram's 7, you may find some surprising scents of maple, caramel, and coffee. However, it will require you to battle the liquid in front of you.
To clarify, Seagram's 7 smells as much like pure rubbing alcohol as anything I've smelled in years. It will singe the hell out of your nose hairs. That paint thinner-like reek is a tell-tale sign of young liquor that has not been aged to round out any harshness or remove any imperfections. You can get your nose pretty far into a glass of any good spirit and smell things leisurely and without discomfort. Here? Fuggitabouddit.
Second, bad spirits taste gross. It's true that to some, all whiskey is so full-flavored (with a very particular flavor) that they consider it yucky in the same way that others dislike acquired tastes like coffee, bell peppers, or kimchi. That is not what is happening here.
Seagram's 7 is yucky by anyone's definition. It arrives on the palate vaguely sweet and watery, but that's where the pleasantries end. After that, there's an intensely unpalatable aspartame / Nutri-Sweet like chemical flavor that dominates everything else. It tastes simultaneously burnt and metallic. It's unusually sour. It tastes like a variety of things you are not supposed to eat.
At times, it has aspirations of masquerading as a bad bourbon. There's some funkiness from the corn used as a distillate (because it's cheap!), and enough oak influence to add to its weird overall sourness. It also has the sensation of being over-proofed, again like a bad bourbon, in that it tries to make up for its shortcomings by giving you a higher proof. This is all the more strange considering Seagram's 7 is only 40% ABV. Another lesson here: bad whiskeys often taste harsher than the ABV would imply.
And when you swallow it, oh boy. It just lingers and lingers, so it's more like feeling a weird residue stuck to your tongue than anything else. You'll be most aware of the fake sweetness and chemical sourness here. Imagine the worst sugar-free lemon drop ever, and that's pretty close to the effect. I've literally had way better cough drops.
So onto why it sucks. They've phoned everything in. They haven't really aged it, for one thing. On the bottle, you'll note it says it's a “blended whiskey” —i.e., a whiskey blended with something else. One quarter of the product is whiskey. The other three quarters are neutral grain spirits, which is basically vodka that lacks the distillation process other vodka makers undertake to make their product palatable. It's charitable to even call this stuff whiskey in the first place.
Also keep in mind that Seagram's 7 is mostly shit-grade vodka by design so that they can engineer a “light” whiskey at a stupid-low price point. My miniature tells me in fancy script that Seagram's 7 is “Rich and full flavored without a trace of heaviness.” To its credit, thank god it isn't heavier, because otherwise I don't think I could handle it.
And the last point about bad whiskeys: it's almost like you need to drink them with a mixer by default. Here I mention the “Seven and Seven,” which combines Seagram's 7 with 7-up, a beverage that basically tastes like carbonated sugar with some vague pretensions of citrus. Combine the two, and you get a cloying drink that kinda sorta tastes like whiskey, but it’s admittedly far better than having Seagram's 7 on its own. Your local bar would love to serve you this combination of less than a dollar's worth of booze and less than a quarter's worth of soda for $7.
Maybe if I live long enough I'll have a worse whiskey than Seagram's 7. Maybe. It's hard to envision what that looks like. In the meantime, I usually have a mini or two on hand simply to be able to prove to people that not all whiskey tastes the same—in this regard, it is a brutally effective teaching tool. Drink it, and you will experience badness on all fronts.
