Barterhouse Review

Barterhouse is a 20 year old bourbon from Diageo that was the second whiskey released under the Orphan Barrel project. If you want to really nerd out and read the backstory on all of the whiskeys in the Orphan Barrel series you can read Chuck Cowdery’s post on his blog. The TLDR; is that these were barrels that for whatever reason didn’t end up in any of Diageo’s other products and are now being batched out as limited one-offs.

It’s hard to talk about the Orphan Barrel series without acknowledging the ruffling of feathers over the whole thing which started when Diageo insinuated the first releases were from the legendary but now defunct Stitzel Weller Distillery. In reality the barrels were actually produced at the Bernheim Distillery and only aged at the Stitzel Weller warehouses which Diageo currently owns. The other major stir was the way Diageo seemed to be hammering home the limited edition aspect of each of the Orphan Barrel releases. As an example, in the five sentences that make up the Orphan Barrel story on orphanbarrel.com, the word “rare” appears three times. Yet despite all these super limited claims, bottle numbers in the hundreds of thousands have been spotted in the wild.

Unfortunately these days you are going to be missing out on really good whiskey if you get too wrapped up in the politics of it all. As such, today I’m going to cast all the drama aside and just focus on what really matters: how it tastes.

Note: This is from the first batch of Barterhouse which hit the market back in early 2014. Per a recent interview on the Bourbon Pursuit podcast, Ewan Morgan of Diageo has indicated there is a second batch of Barterhouse that should be hitting shelves now.

45.1% ABV; 20 years old; $80

Notes: The nose starts off with some wood polish and butterscotch. It’s a wonderful nose and immediately you can start to notice lots of oak complexity. On the tongue there is an explosion of vanilla and a heap of woody flavors. The end of the taste is dry with tannic oak but also a dark, brooding sweetness. The oak has little hints of musty funk to it so it definitely tastes its age. I’m very sensitive to oak funk notes but this one has just the right amount for me which is only enough to add some depth and to keep things interesting. If it has a fault I would say the finish leaves something to be desired, I don’t get much lasting other than just slightly bitter wood. If I had to sum up the bottle in a few words I would say “woody but interesting”.

Thoughts: When you take all the drama around Diageo out of the equation it’s hard to deny Barterhouse has a lot going for it. It tastes pretty good, it’s well priced for a 20 year old, and it’s seemingly not very hard find if you believe the internet. As a affirmation of its quality I simply have to point to a blind tasting my local whiskey group did a while back where Barterhouse finished second only to Four Roses 2012 Limited Edition Small Batch.

After trying every Orphan Barrel released so far except for Forged Oak, Barterhouse is by far my favorite in terms of taste and I would also consider it the best value. In fact it’s the only one I would buy. With a second batch of this rolling out now I’ll most likely be grabbing another one.

Rating: B