Victoria Pineapple Finish Whiskey Is a Summer Sipper

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

It’s a flavored whiskey world, and we’re just living in it. Actually, the whiskey we’re covering this week is not a “flavored whiskey” per se, it’s something much more interesting. Bardstown Bourbon Company, which is well known for indulging its experimental impulses, decided to blend together bourbon and rye and finish it in pineapple rum barrels with pieces of pineapple added to the whiskey for good measure. The result is somehow very good, despite my preconceptions about how this might taste, and it’s a bottle that should be added to your list of summertime sippers.

But maybe I should know better. After all, for the most part Lofted Spirits master blender Dan Callaway has been able to get away with a wide and weird variety of blends and cask finishes. After all, this is the guy who sometimes incorporates Pop Rocks into a whiskey tasting (again, something that somehow works). So here are the details about this new release, which is called Victoria Pineapple Barrel Finish. The base spirit is a blend of 10 and 11-year-old bourbon and rye: 40 percent 11-year Indiana bourbon, 40 percent 10-year Indiana bourbon, and 20 percent Indiana 11-year rye (so all likely from MGP). That’s a pretty good way to start.

That blend was then placed into barrels previously used to mature pineapple rum casks for a total of 27 months. While BBC doesn’t say exactly where those came from, the likely source is Planteray Stiggins’ Fancy Pineapple Rum. And that would make sense, given that the distillery has sourced barrels from other brands owned by Planteray founder Alexandre Gabriel, including rum barrels back when it was called Plantation, and Cognac barrels from his Maison Ferrand house. Fresh pieces of pineapple were also put into the liquid to mimic the maturation process that the rum underwent, as well as custom-toasted oak staves (officially, this is a “distilled spirits specialty,” per TTB guidelines). Finally, the whiskey was bottled at 106 proof.

This all starts to make sense in the glass. It was a smart move to add some rye into the blend, and to use older whiskeys that had already picked up some oaky tannins during their decade or more in barrels. The whiskey is certainly noticeably sweet, as you might expect, but it’s not cloying. And, of course, there are some pineapple notes in the mix, along with dried fruit, toasted nuts, vanilla, espresso, dark chocolate, and peach pie. This is a fun whiskey to sip neat, but I would also recommend using it in an Old Fashioned. Maybe you don’t even need simple syrup or sugar here, just a few dashes of some spiced bitters and stirred over a large rock, with a dried pineapple slice for garnish.

Victoria Pineapple Finish is a pretty limited release, both in terms of actual number of bottles and the fact that it’s a Kentucky exclusive, but no doubt it will start to appear on the secondary market if it hasn’t already. You might think you won’t like a pineapple infused, rum barrel-aged whiskey; trust me, I was once one of you. But once again, the Bardstown Bourbon Company team has shown its blending and finishing prowess, and the result is a really fun, and really tasty, surprise.

Score: 93

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