Quote:
Originally Posted by Kiimosabi
(Post 13863361)
Many of the Ryes you get aren't made by the label. Take, for instance, High West Rye. Is it brewed with the other whiskeys in Park City, UT?
Nope.
It comes from Indiana. Midwest Grain Products of Indiana, or MGP for short.
What other awesome Ryes you love are actually all the same shit from MGP? The list will depress you:
Angel's Envy
Bulleit Rye
Filibuster
George Dickel Rye
High West
James E. Pepper
Redemption
Smooth Ambler
Templeton Rye
Everything you know is a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGP_of_Indiana
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That is true of a lot of different liquors. And there is a lot of hype and conspicuous consumption.
It doesn't take that much money to make clean vodka that is nothing but alcohol and water. After that, you are paying for status. Or you are paying for flavored vodka, which is fine, if usually overpriced and you could always start with straight vodka and flavor it yourself.
I've read experiments where typical wine drinkers will rate a wine higher if they think it came from a $40 bottle than when the exact same wine came out of a $10 bottle.
And then much the rest of it is an acquired taste. That doesn't mean it is not enjoyable.
Every couple months or so I will go to a snobbish cocktail bar in SF and have a couple of overpriced cocktails. I usually prefer one with a rye/bourbon base, some type of sweet liqueur and then some type of bitter vermouth/aperitif to offset the sweetness, and served up. I realize I'm paying for the "experience" as much as the alcohol. That's fine. I don't do it that often.
For instance here is a recent one I liked:
bourbon, Cointreau, maraschino, amer, Angostura and
Peychaud’s bitters
I will then, depending on how hard and expensive it is to find the ingredients, try making it at home.
I've done blind taste tests with different ryes for instance. I can tell a cocktail made with a super cheap bottle, but once you get up to comparing $25 bottles with $50+, I could no longer tell a difference between the two side by side cocktails. The vermouth/aperitif are also over priced, but they are distinctive in a way that rye, for instance, is not. So I've accumulated a stock of those over time.
The only premium base alcohol that I could consistently tell apart in a blind cocktail test from a moderately priced one is aged tequila versus the cheaper, less aged tequila. The cocktail made with a $25 bottle of tequila had an aftertaste that the $50 one did not. That was not the case with the rye and bourbons that I experimented with.
