Jack Daniel’s Gentleman Jack
Jack Daniel’s Gentleman Jack Tennessee Whiskey
Next up is Gentleman Jack made by the iconic Jack Daniels. I know I'm supposed to give deference to good old King Jack, but, oh well…
Like all Jack’s, this is a Tennessee Whiskey, which is a bourbon that has been “mellowed” in sugar maple charcoal – referred to as the Lincoln County Process. In the case of Jack, this is a 3-5 day process where the distillate is filtered through 10 ft (a smidge over 3 meters for those of you from away) of charcoal. The Gentleman Jack release is DOUBLE “mellowed”. As the name implies, I’m expecting a refined version of Jack.
ABV: 40% (ugh, this is a bad start)
How it smells…sweet vanilla, it really just smells like sugar. Some cinnamon but not the spice of it, but as if the scent were on a scratch and sniff sticker.
How it tastes…lightly sweet to start followed by a bit of wood astringency. The end has mild baking spices and the finish is watery. It’s like that last sip of bourbon in your glass when you’ve been drinking it on the rocks and the ice has all melted, but you have to take the last sip before you can refill so you muscle up and swig it down so you can start anew.
Price…$35
Rating...🥃🥃
Final thoughts….Hm…where to begin? I think this was mellowed just a bit too much. It feels like a sip that is great for people who really like water and have heard about this thing called whiskey and want to give it a try, but they’re not ready to get out of their water comfort zone. If this is the “gentleman” version because it is smooth (water is also very smooth, mind you) then it’s a passive aggressive gentleman at best.
I had high hopes of finding another cheap whiskey and this let me down big time. Full disclosure, I don’t drink a lot of TN whiskey. Not for lack of trying, mind you, but I find that I don’t love many of the Dickel releases and I wouldn’t touch Jack Daniels Old No. 7 unless I had no alternative to any booze. That said, I want to like this category, I just haven’t found my muse yet. Ok, I agree, that was a lame statement.
Rating wise I don’t know how I can give this anything above a 2x 🥃 (my initial visceral reaction was 1x 🥃, but cooler heads prevailed). If it was a penny higher, then I’d bump it down.
I also don’t fully appreciate the Lincoln County Process which separates traditional bourbon from the TN whiskey category. I implore those of you who are faithful TN whiskey fanatics to explain your faith to me. It seems, through the TN whiskeys that I have had, that you lose a lot of the interesting components of bourbon and magnify the sweetness of it. Maybe it’s my lack of sweet tooth that gives me pause? I don’t know. In this instance, it seems that doing this process twice, or for a longer period of time, has done what it advertised. It made a doubly mellow whiskey, so mellow in fact, that I think the Lincoln County Lobotomization is a more appropriate title.
