Skip to main content

A Comparison Between Our Brewing Company's Bourbon Bottles


 Our Brewing Company (76 E 8th St, Holland, MI 49423), opened in 2012, has been a staple of the Holland beer scene since they opened with a bang, running out of beer during their grand opening celebrations, and having to shut down for 2 weeks to build up stock again.  They're a personal favorite of mine - I've had a mug club membership there for 10 years now.  The atmosphere is great, and they're not afraid to experiment with different, cool, and obscure beer styles!

In 2019, they started experimenting with distilling.  Everything was brewed, distilled, aged, and packaged in house for their bourbons, so everything was done under their control - no MGP stuff here (unlike Coppercraft Distillery, north of downtown Holland).  Their first release of this batch was aged for 3 years, in 2022.  Each subsequent offering was released at 1 year intervals:  4 year in 2023, 5 year in 2024, 6 year in 2025, and 7 year in 2026.  I've been fortunate (through my mug club membership and following them on Instagram and the social medias) to be able to acquire each bottle of their spirits, so I thought I'd spend my day sampling each bourbon head to head:

The 3 year bourbon was bright!  Raw, green, and assertively oaky.  Bear in mind that this bottle has been opened and exposed to air for 5 years, so that's going to impact the flavor a little.  But, this was a great entree into OBC's bourbon.  There's a lot of potential to be had with this particular dram!  If one were wont to mix this, I could see it going incredibly well with a citrusy mixer, say a Whiskey Sour or a Hot Toddy.

The 4 year started coming alive, bringing out notes of heavy vanilla with a warming, wafery flavor.  I got flavors of those little yellow bastards that they put on tiramisu (Ladyfingers?) on the palate, but ooey gooey vanilla all over the aroma.

5 year evolved into heavy caramel flavoring, with the sort of aromas you'd get from a candy shop coming on the nose.  Not quite cinnamon redhots, or ginger snaps, but the sort of amalgamation of sweet smells you get inside a store like, oh, Holland Peanut Store. 

My favorite, by far, was the 6 year pour.  Vanillin and that "old book" smell were aggressive on the nose, which made it feel like a more mainstream Kentucky bourbon.  I actually did a head-to-head between this and Buffalo Trace, and found that the OBC tasted nearly identical to the Buffalo Trace, but with everything cranked to 11.  This is one bottle I'm going to treasure until it's gone, it's incredibly well done.  It's complex, and challenges the drinker to soak it all in and enjoy it.

The 7 year almost tasted overcooked...heavy on the caramel, peanut brittle, or Christmas candy on the palate; with dusty, oaky notes on the nose - smelled like Grandpa's yard after he got a cord of red oak to chop for winter heat. But, differently oaky than the 3 year.  Lots of barrel character - appropriate, I suppose, for a bourbon that's been in a barrel for 7 years.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Eddie Bentz Bank Robbery

Prohibition is one of the most storied periods in American history. Urban myths and legends abound nationwide, with tales of folk heroes like Al Capone, Babyface Nelson, and John Dillinger. Tall tales are woven around organized crime, wild bootleggers, underground saloons, and well-dressed gangsters. There's something uniquely American about the DIY ethos of taking matters into your own hands, making illegal alcohol, and selling it through clandestine channels; stickin' it to the man like those in the illegal alcohol industry did. These stories are immortalized in movies like The Road To Perdition and Public Enemies, as well as TV series like HBO's Boardwalk Empire and, well, PBS's Prohibition. Many lakeshore towns in Western Michigan have tales of organized crime and bootlegging. Easy access to Lake Michigan meant that bootleggers had easy access to boat routes, safely out of reach of authorities. Booze was funneled in from Canada, then taken by boat to cities all aro...
Post a Comment
Read more

XFinity Sucks. Or, Why I'm Excited For Holland BPW Fiber To Come Through Our Neighborhood

 The whole thing started in October - we hit the data cap for our XFinity plan in 2 or 3 days. I didn't know we had a data cap on our XFinity plan, so I was befuddled. Problem is, you can't just call XFinity, you must escalate your ticket up their chain of command: Start with their AI chatbot, escalate to a human typing on the other end of the chatroom, get transferred to an AI phone operator, escalate that to any number of human phone operators. Somewhere in that initial escalation, they discovered that we weren't on an actual plan from them, and the services we had weren't even offered by them anymore - our account had slipped through the cracks. Their "solution" to the massive data leak was to give sell us the premium tier service with no data cap...which didn't actually solve anything, it just passed the buck down the road. By October 6 or 7, we had blown through another terrabyte of data, so I reached out to Customer Service agai...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cedar Swamp Village

Holland has only been a settled city for a little over 170 years. But, it's got a dense, unique history. I took an interest in local history during my college years at Northern Michigan University, and was able to take that interest back home after graduation. Recently, I began researching for this blog, and hanging out at the library, poring through the Local History section. I found an old, forboding looking book, entitled Memorials Of The Grand River Valley, flipped open to a seemingly random page, and read the passage "The Indian village, near the southeastern limits of the city,w as also a prominent landing-place. The log-houses, built by the Indians, were of great service to the newly arrived immigrants; and, as it appears, there never has been any trouble between the Red man and the Dutchman." This piqued my interest, as I live near the southeastern limits of Holland. Was there an Indian village in my own neighborhood that history forgot? Memorials ad...
Post a Comment
Read more