Old whiskey vs. new whiskey

[mrbigjas]

SO... a year ago, maybe longer, my father in law gave me an unopened bottle of jameson he'd had sitting in his liquor cabinet for who knows how long. when i say who knows, i mean 20 years isn't out of the question at all. it might have been a gift and be younger than that, but there's an equal chance that it's even older.

well, i said to myself, this'll be interesting--let's do a comparison. i mean, after all with big ol' mass produced blended whiskeys like this, part of the point of the way they do things is that the company's tasters blend various whiskeys so that it has the same flavor profile each year, right?

well, i didn't get around to it until a couple of weeks ago. now, i like irish whiskey and drink it pretty often, but for some reason things just didn't work out before now. so my wife and i did a double blind tasting so i could see how things turned out.

so here are the bottles:

the older is on the right, perhaps obviously. what you can't see in this pic is that the old bottle is 86 proof, and the new is 80 proof. here's a shot of their tax label thingies--i don't know if the codes will give anyone an idea of how old the older bottle is; if for some reason someone knows how much they import or whatever:

so here they are in the glasses:

hmm.... i swear this wasn't all so blurry when i took them.

they look pretty much the same. eh?

anyway, the two were strikingly different. one had a very noticeable light pear aroma which dominated, with vanilla and other light fruity sweetness (actually i just went back and revisited, and the pear flavor is even more noticeable now that i'm tasting for it; almost to the elimination of anything else). the other had a much more medicinal peatiness to it, and had an alcoholic aroma which reminded me a little of grappa or something--that rubbing alcohol smell.

i assumed, for some reason, that the rougher funkier one (B, above, in case it matters) would be the new one--i guess i figured if anything could happen in the bottle, things would mellow out and get sweeter and whatnot. anyway, i was wrong and it turns out it was the older one.

i'm having another of the old ones right now and it's definitely harder going than what i think of when i order a jameson in a bar. which is interesting because when she has whiskey, my wife prefers bushmills because she thinks jameson is too medicinal and hotly alcoholic tasting. but comparing the new to the old, the new doesn't have a bit of those flavors, relatively. there's been a serious change in the flavor profile which i think can't entirely be attributed to the proof.

so anyway, while i've had pretty much every jameson on the market right now, from the regular stuff to the 12, 15, 18 years, to the midleton very rare to the 1870 in the old school replica bottle, i don't remember one tasting like this. it's pretty interesting, and makes me wonder why and how things have changed. i'd like to taste an 86 proof jameson made nowadays.

respectfully submitted,

jas.

[eje]

Cool!

I'm very jealous. The only whiskey my father ever got as a gift was Canadian Club.

Not sure when they changed the proof, that might be the easiest thing to find out.

Doing some googling, I found a picture of an advertisement that appears to date after 1982 with the same label. Different bottle closure, though.

Pool Advertisement

[eje]

Though, from this webpage on the Pernod-Ricard website, distillation ceased at the Bow Street Distillery in 1971, so your bottle may pre-date that closure.

Isn't there a date on the tax label?

[mrbigjas]

no date that i noticed, no. just that code. although you know, i'll look more closely when i get home.

interesting about the bow st. distillery closing--it still says it on the new bottle, right above the PRODUCT OF IRELAND.

i don't know that much about the history of the various irish whiskeys, so this is interesting...

[eje]

Here's another good webpage I found.

I think all the Jameson products are now distilled at the Middleton Distillery in Cork.

From a few other pages I've read, the Bow Street Distillery is pretty much just offices and museum these days.

Edited December 22, 2005 by eje (log)