~$35 for 750mL bottle- Purchased at Jax Liquor, Chattanooga, TN
Background
“Legent is a landscape changing bourbon. It takes what you expect from a Kentucky straight bourbon, expands it and opens it up to a world of new ideas and possibilities.”
That’s directly from the company’s website…these folks are not shying away from declaring that this new whiskey is something extra special. Let’s take a look at the story behind this recent release. They started with a bourbon recipe that hails from Fred Noe’s family. You may know the Noe family from such whiskies as Jim Beam…and that’s really it…you don’t need to know them from elsewhere. Fred Noe is the great-grandson of Jim Beam and a seventh-generation distiller. The whiskey is made in Clermont, Kentucky, and aged for at least four years in newly-charred white oak barrels.
After that, some of the Bourbon is aged in sherry and red wine casks, where it picks up the unique flavors from the different casks…layers of “spice and fruity undertones…light tartness.” Then Shinji Fukuyo (who you may know as the master-blender for Suntory, a Japanese whisky company) blends together this “distinct, secondary-finished” bourbons with Kentucky straight bourbon, balancing the flavors to hit the flavor profile he and Noe envisioned.
This is a very interesting mash-up of visions that was made possible because of the acquisition of the Beam company by the Suntory Japanese whisky company about 6 years ago. The blend is credited to a new company—Legent Distilling Co.—but the secondary website (drinksmart.com) on the bottle is a Beam Suntory operation with nutritional and other information about all their brands. So I would say this is definitely part of that conglomerate (which also produces Jim Beam, Makers Mark, Basil Hayden, Roku Gin, Yamazaki, Bowmore, Auchentoshan, Hornitos, Canadian Club, Cruz, Dekuyper, and Sauza, among other brands).
Notes
The bottle tries to have an east-meets-west ethic to it, with more traditional font and bottle shape that you would expect from a bourbon, along with the paintbrush stroke that you might see on a Japanese whisky. The color of the whiskey here is definitely more “bourbon” than anything else, with a medium-dark amber hue.
Giving it a good sniff, I picked up vanilla and oak mostly, along with a touch of graininess and sherry. It’s when you sip it that things get really interesting. While this is a blend of Beam whiskies—and most of their Bourbons tend to be fairly sweet—this one is not that sweet. There’s definitely the corn and vanilla sweetness that all bourbon carries, but this has other floral and wine notes, along with some spice and rougher components that tend to cover up the sweetness a bit. It reminds me of Chattanooga Whiskey’s Tennessee High Malt Bourbon, which has a higher malted barley content and a lower amount of sweetness. The flavor here isn’t exactly the same…it just reminded me of that because of the lesser sweetness. It’s definitely interesting and unique in the marketplace.
I opted to pair this up with a cigar made by the collaboration of a couple legends: the Avo Unexpected Moment. You may recall this was part of a widely-criticized marketing effort by Davidoff Cigars for their Avo subsidiary, in which they released old blends in new packaging in sizes that don’t exist in the regular lineup. This cigar is really the Avo Domaine, a blend made for jazz pianist and cigar entrepreneur, Avo Uvezian, and blended by Henke Kelner.
I’m normally a proponent of “whiskey neat” but I have more recently been known to add a little water to see what happens. This time around doing so made the bourbon taste sweeter than it does neat, helping the pairing with the cigar which was musty and grassy with a little pepper. The flavors ended up complementing each other quite well.
The Legent website has cocktail recipes, too. I would be interested in trying this bourbon in a cocktail to see how it would perform in those circumstances. By itself, it’s a unique pour with tons of complexity added through the wine and sherry cask-aged portions. Very nice and at a price that doesn’t break the bank.
