Widow Jane 10 Year Old

Widow Jane Distillery is a bottler (they say ‘curator’) based in Brooklyn, New York. While they now have their own distilling equipment, most of their range, like this Widow Jane 10 Year Old bourbon, isn’t distilled there but sourced from an undisclosed distillery in Kentucky.

The name of the whiskey comes from the water source: it is brought down to bottling strength with pure limestone mineral water from the Widow Jane mine in Rosendale, NY. You can even buy this water in bottled form from them, but I’m not much of a water fetishist when it comes to diluting my bourbon whiskey.

Widow Jane bourbon is made from heirloom corn varieties. I’m trying single cask number 1791 bottled in 2018. In the meantime the label seems to have changed a little, mentioning a blend of straight bourbon whiskey.

Widow Jane 10 yo
(45,5%, OB 2018, cask #1791)

Nose: initially a heady aroma of nail polish remover and fragrant oak. This becomes less apparent after a while, and anyway I’m not against a solventy edge in bourbon. Then lots of buttery toffee, caramel coated cookies, vanilla syrup. Warm oak spices. A little chocolate and light citrus.

Mouth: the onset is more silky than I expected from the nose. Plenty of oak spice though, cinnamon, clove. Burnt sugar and smoky wood. Maple syrup. Black cherries. Vanilla and buttered corn.

Finish: medium long, fairly tannic and even a little harsh, with light menthol and charred wood.

A rich and reasonably complex bourbon, but also one of the oakier ones, making it loose some points in the finish. Available from Master of Malt or TWE for instance.

Score: 84/100