I tend to write more about expensive whiskeys than the affordable stuff because a lot of the quality bottlings being released nowadays are, for better and worse, also priced at “superpremium” levels, as publicists like to call the top-shelf offerings. But every now and then there are exceptions, and one of my favorites is the George Dickel Bottled-in-Bond series. It made its debut in 2019, when the brand was at something of a crossroads. Dickel made (and makes) a lot of quality whiskey (though they spell it without the “e”), but much of it was being sourced out to other brands. New releases sporting the Dickel name, meanwhile, were uninspiring or, in the case of a gimmicky Tabasco barrel-finished “Hot Dickel” expression, something of an embarrassment.
Nicole Austin took over as the general manager and distiller of Dickel and the Cascade Hollow Distilling Co., which makes it, in 2018. One of the first things she did was to distance herself from Hot Dickel, emphasizing that it had already been in the pipeline when she came onboard and it wasn’t the kind of product she’d normally be working on. It was a ballsy move, and it got the attention of a lot of folks who thought of Dickel as little more than the other Tennessee whisky, overshadowed by Jack Daniel’s.
The first Dickel Bottled-in-Bond release, a 13-year-old expression priced at a ridiculously affordable $35, was an audacious move on Austin’s part that almost singlehandedly re-established Dickel as a real player on the American whiskey scene. It won multiple awards, including Whisky Advocate magazine’s “Whisky Of The Year,” but more importantly to Austin, people actually drank it rather than hoarding it or socking it away as a future investment. “I want it to be something that people drink right now,” she told me on a recent Zoom chat. “Just, like, buy it and drink it, and buy it and make a cocktail with it. I'm kind of happy how it turned out.”
There's a little less of the fifth volume of Dickel's Bottled-in-Bond series than there was of the ... [+]
Three more bonded bottlings followed, the last one in September 2022. And then... nothing. I figured that Dickel’s parent company Diageo had pulled the plug on the series because it was too much of a bargain, and were trying to figure out how to repackage it and raise the price. Fortunately, I was wrong. In fact, it was just an issue of finding whiskey that Austin considered worthy of releasing. “I really am making liquid quality-driven decisions,” she told me. “I'm not, it's not a set cadence. I'm not meeting any particular release dates, I'm not meeting a specific volume target or anything that the market [dictates].... There will be as much of it as there is, because I don't control time.”
To be clear, bottled-in-bond whiskey has to meet specific guidelines that are laid down at distillation. It has to be distilled in a single six-month season at a single distillery; it has to be aged in a federally bonded warehouse for at least four years; and it has to be bottled at exactly 100 proof. So not every whiskey in the Dickel warehouses meets that criteria, and fewer still meet Austin’s own standards for “the ones that I think are of a caliber that would be appropriate for bottled-in-bond,” she says. “So that means, it’s good enough and complex enough, but also displaying the right characteristics and aromatics.”
The fifth release in the series, the prosaically named George Dickel Bottled in Bond Spring 2011, Aged 12 Years, is, like its predecessors, distilled from a mashbill of 84% corn, 8% rye, and 8% malted barley. That technically makes it a bourbon. But Tennessee whisky distinguishes itself from its Kentucky brethren through its use of the Lincoln County Process, also known as charcoal filtration prior to aging. The price is up to a suggested $44.99 retail price, which still makes it quite the bargain for its age and pedigree.
Dickel distiller/general manager Nicole Austin in her element, among the barrels.
My first sip, taken literally seconds after I’d opened my sample (provided for free by the brand, for the record, and for which I promised or guaranteed nothing), was alarming — heavy on roasted nuts and spicy, slightly astringent oak. This was what we’d been waiting more than 18 months for? But let my mishandling of the whiskey be a lesson. Some spirits taste great right after opening, but most benefit from a little breathing time. A few minutes in the glass and the oak had mellowed considerably, and the pecan and hazelnut notes were joined by sweet cherry, light chocolate and caramel. I returned to it periodically over the next several hours, and it just kept getting better, sweet and tongue-coating with a dry, oaky backbone. It makes a terrific cocktail — especially a Manhattan — with a high enough proof to stand up to dilution but not so high to get you blotto.
Diageo, Dickel’s parent company, doesn’t disclose the number of bottles released for the series, but Austin warns that there’s less of this fifth edition than there was of the fourth (”That’s what happens when you make a totally quality-driven decision”). The good news is that the sixth volume is already set to go when volume five sells through — during the search for the current bottling, she says, “there were actually two different [distilling] seasons that were in a pretty equivalent place, and so I did them both.” I can only hope she’s searching for Number 7 now.
