183. McMenamins Billy Wheated Whiskey Review

Welcome to another trip down the Bourbon Road with your hosts, Jim and Mike. So grab a glass of your favorite bourbon and kick back.

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Hello, everybody. I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt.

And this is the Bourbon Road. And today, Mike, we're doing another Craft Distillery Monday.

Yeah.

And when the big chief can't get his hands on weeded bourbon, next best thing is, well, besides weeded beer, is weeded whiskey. Yeah, weeded whiskey. So today on the show, We've got a weeded whiskey. And this weeded whiskey, you brought it back. You did a road trip out to the West Coast. You were out in Oregon. Yeah. Fishing trip.

Fishing trip with my brother.

Yeah. And you were traveling through Oregon. And of course, when you travel, you're still doing whiskey.

Yeah, most definitely. I mean, some people probably saw me on Instagram or on our Facebook page. I drank a little bit of, we drank an entire bottle of the Buffalo Trace out there. And then we also drank some Luxro root beer whiskey just to try it out. We drank a bottle of that and introduced some people to bourbon out there and had a great time, but we'd stopped at this place to eat some McMenamins. And they've got 58 locations across Oregon and Washington state and a great food. There's lodges there. So the place we'd stop was the grand lodge. It was a Masonic home. Kind of a, you know, that's where Masons would go and kind of a nursing home for them, I guess. Sure. Um, but they turn this place into a hotel and a restaurant. We went in there to eat after we got finished flying out to Portland and stuff. And we're leaving and I look in a gift shop and there's a whole bunch of whiskey bottles in there. So I just gravitated right over there. Yeah.

So your eyes are trying to focus on something you haven't had before? Most definitely.

So that's all they have there is their whiskeys. And I gravitated to one that said wheat on the front of it with a billy goat with wheat in its mouth. And you know, I was cracking up laughing a little bit. But I saw wheat and I was like, man, I'm interested in this. And the thing I wanted to make sure was that they were making this themselves. That's very important to us, you know, is that we try to get somebody on there that's not contract distilling. Nothing's wrong with that, right? Right. They're sourced, but this is, they're making this themselves. So Menon's Billy Whiskey is crafted in small batches at the Cornelis Pass Roadhouse Distillery. Okay. And this is actually four years old.

Yeah, I saw that. And I also noticed that it was actually distilled in a cognac still.

Yeah. That's pretty cool. From France. Now I don't know how much difference that is.

Yeah. Do you know the difference? I don't know. I'm sure they've got to be a little bit different, but they said an ancient one, right?

Yeah, that's what it says. Um, now they had another whiskey called Billy's bite. I, that didn't peak my interest so much as this. This was $35 for this bottle. Um, had the goat on there with weed in his mouth and I was like, I gotta bring this back. It'd be a good laugh for me and you to laugh about it a little bit. Um, but you know, still whiskey, um, Now this was $35, not a bad price for this whiskey.

87 proof, right?

Yeah. 87 proof. What you expect out of some little craft distilleries. Now they've got 58 locations selling this at, and you can buy it on liquor stores there. So, you know, that's pretty good distribution.

So we've got a large number of listeners in the Northwest, in Oregon, in Washington state. If you're out there and you're hearing this, listen close. Our review might pique your interest.

Or if you're traveling out there and you're always wanting to stop by something. We've got a lot of listeners that travel for business and they're kind of like me. They want to peruse those whiskey shelves or they might go into the Grand Lodge, get themselves a meal and go in the gift shop. Grabbed myself a bottle of whiskey.

All right. Let's get to it, Mike. Let's do it.

Getting a little bit of banana note on this for some reason.

Yeah, it's very sweet. Extremely sweet on the nose for me. I think I mentioned to you, I was getting a little hint of a medicinal note, but I may be, I may be wrong about that. That might not be a medicinal note. It might just be a little bit of like menthol, you know, kind of a menthol note to it.

I'm getting a little bit of a little bit of spice. I don't know if maybe that's what you're getting as that mint. Um, and it wouldn't be spice from, from her eye, maybe from the barrel. and it's aged for four years. But the aging out there, it's got to be different because the temperatures, even though they had a heat wave out there recently, their temperatures aren't that bad. On the coast, it was cold. It was like 45 degrees at nighttime. It's cold right now, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm still getting that banana, like Foster's note on there. A little bit of floral notes, which you'd expect with wheat.

Yeah, a little bit of spice, not too much. Mostly sweet for me. That little bit of mintiness that I'm getting on the nose.

And out there, you'd expect a wheat. I'm glad they're making a wheat because there were miles and miles and miles of just wheat fields in the Willamette Valley there in the Portland area. Willamette. Willamette. That's a hop. Yeah. Willamette hops. And there was hops everywhere too. Now they're going through a little bit of dry season, but the soil there, I would expect it to be, um, super rich, you know, great for growing stuff because, you know, often the distance from Portland, you can see Mount St. Helens and, uh, the lady that picked us up, Susie from the airport, she was actually telling us what she was a kid, Mount St. Helens erupted. Um, there were like four inches of just ash everywhere and they were putting like mason jars and stuff. So I assume that that went into the soil and helped, you know, better growth, I would assume.

Yeah. It either helps it or harms it, but I guess it probably helped it, right? A little bit of potash or whatever they call that.

Yeah. You till that in the soil. Sure. I mean, I always take my ash out and put it in my garden. And, um, you know, we, we got tomatoes bigger than my fist. So I would assume volcanic ash helps it out. It doesn't Hawaii anyways. So that was neat to see. And I was glad to see this in this bottle.

Well, I'm ready to taste it. Cheers. Cheers. Definitely follows the nose. Very sweet upfront. And I would expect that from a whiskey. I think that's probably kind of what you would expect. A little bit different to me.

Um, almost beer type on this. I'm getting a little bit of, I don't know, but I still get a little bit of banana on it. A little bit of sweetness.

Like you said, yeah, it's just for me, it's soft. It's sweet. It's, um, it's got a little bit of a zing to it. Um, probably trying to think of what that zing is.

It's like a little bit of clove, just a tad bit of clove.

Yeah, maybe a little bit of clove. The mint's kind of carrying over it a little bit, but it's light. It, uh, it's kind of watery, you know, it's not very thick. That 87 proof you'd kind of think that, right? Yeah, sure. Sure.

Let me tell you what I'm getting out of you. Yeah. Whorehound candy. Are you really? Whorehound candy. I mean, you've talked about that many a time on here and some people have asked us what whorehounds are. It's a, it's kind of a medicinal candy from like Tractor Supply or Cracker Barrel or somewhere like that. You can get them.

Yeah. Probably the best well-known place to get them at is Cracker Barrel.

Yeah.

But they're a little bit, they're kind of a, I don't say a little bit of, a little bit of Sassafras, but at the same time, a little bit of licorice, kind of a licorice Sassafras, um, anise.

I got a mixture of a cough drop.

Yeah, cough drop candy. So maybe, maybe when I said medicinal to start with, that's kind of where I was leaning. I was leaning towards that sort of cough droppy kind of. No.

Yeah. I'd like to see this at a higher proof somewhere in that a hundred proof, you know, I think would be, maybe it wouldn't be so watery. Um, with that many locations, you gotta wonder what they can produce off that steel and how big that steel is and how far they got to stretch it.

Yeah. You know, I'm looking at the name of this Billy whiskey. I'm thinking back to the eighties and, uh, Billy beer. Remember Billy beer? What was that old, uh, Bill Clinton's? Uh, no, it was, uh, no, it was, uh, Jimmy Carter's little brother. Jimmy Carter. There you go. Billy Carter and Billy beer. Billy beer. The family disgrace, right?

This ain't bad. I mean, for local whiskey at $35, um, You know, I don't know. I was glad to buy it, you know, support a local place, grab some whiskey, bring it back. I don't know that I could mix this with anything because it's 87 proof.

Yeah. I think this is an interesting bottle. It certainly is one that, you know, tells part of a tale of the trip you were on. You know, fishing trip to Oregon, caught yourself a salmon, didn't you?

I caught one salmon. I was expecting to catch a lot more stuff and it was just, We went out and fished in the ocean and it was pretty rough out there. Everybody else thought it was rough. I was like, ah, it's all right, you know.

Yeah. I mean, you're kind of used to that.

Well, we actually got to see the coast guard out there working with a helicopter and the rescue swimmers being dropped in the water. So that's, that's kind of neat to kind of get back to my roots. And that's a surf surf station right there. Tell them like Bay is. So it was nice to see that we did catch just a couple of crabs. We caught 46 Dungeness crabs or keepers. We caught a lot more in that we had to throw back some, you got to throw back to females and you got to measure the males, make sure they're the right size. And so we caught 46 Dungeness crabs and the folks we were staying with had never had a crab boil before. So we did a crab boil, kind of did it our way. We did those Adirans in there and we did a, a dozen eggs, corn on the cob, potatoes and crabs. And, uh, man, it was good. I bet they, they just, they were like, they're usually, I said, well, how do you eat these crabs? He's like, Oh, he's used to boil them up in the water. That's how they usually do it.

It's that crab boil stuff, right? Yeah. That makes it good.

Shrimp, shrimp bowl. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Shrimp bowl. Crawfish bowl. The thing about that shrimp bowl, you got to keep in mind is you don't want to do it in the house with the windows closed. Oh no, you don't want to do that.

We were out by a fire and we, we had a great time out there. Cause that cayenne pepper. Yeah. I don't even know if they, some of them might have thought that was a little spicy, but we, thoroughly enjoyed ourselves out there. Jason Rice, uh, with Hammerhead Guide Service, he was who he went out there to see. And I had introduced him to Buffalo Trace. He's like, man, this is good whiskey right here. Um, but I told him, I said, I'm going to find some whiskeys here. So I found this Billy wheat whiskey and I was, I'm glad I did. I'm glad I found it.

Well, I'm glad you had it on the show. Now, you know, it's probably something that only a portion of our listeners are going to be able to get their hands on, either those that live in the Northwest or those that are traveling to the Northwest. But I would say give it a shot. It's great to try something new that you've never had before. I don't know what the particular benefits are to distilling in a cognac still. Maybe that gives it some of these flavors that we're getting now. I don't know. But it is interesting. It is different. It's solid. There's not a thing wrong with it.

No, I'm not getting anything better from it. It's very sweet for sure. I'm still getting that banana taffy from it. Maybe a little bit of salt water. You know, when I start thinking about the ocean, but you think of Oregon, the Oregon coast, you think of that, but Luma Valley is two, two and a half hours inland from the, from the coast. So this is getting salt water. I don't think so. The aging process is different there than it is here. What would it be there? This might be more of a, Ireland, I would think temperatures.

Yeah. I mean, it does have a little bit of what I'm tasting as I am getting that sort of the Irish sense. And I don't know if this has, I don't know what the mash bill is. I don't know if this is, if this is a wheat whiskey is a hundred percent wheat. They didn't say probably got a little bit of malted barley in it. Maybe even a little bit more than we might think because I'm kind of picking that up.

Now that they are known for making malt out there, you know, um, barley, two row barley, I guess is what they make in Oregon. And that was something nice to see. Um, I rather like this. This is a great summer sipping whiskey. It is. Yeah. Um, would be good. And I have no doubt being, you'll polish this off right here. Yeah, I think we could. Um, and it's got a funny goat holding wheat in his mouth. That's kind of a funny label, you know, throwback, maybe seventies, maybe that, maybe that goat ate some of the wacky weed out there.

There you go. There you go. Looks like he's got a, yeah, I got a piece of wheat sticking out of his mouth.

Yeah, it's kind of a medium to long finish on this for this wheat whiskey.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm impressed with it. Now, is that Cognac? I would imagine they're doing a sweet mash on this. You think? Yeah, because they're probably only doing one mash at a time, you know, one cook at a time. Yeah. I can't imagine them doing it another way.

Yeah. The only, the only thing is, you know, worrying about the cleanliness, you know, that, that's steam cleaning every time you've got to clean that still between every batch, but maybe they are, maybe that's a question to go to ask them.

Let's steal it. 35 bucks, a craft, a true craft distillery in Oregon. It just shows that when you get on the road to, to go visit somewhere and you're a whiskey person, a whiskey nerd like us, Um, go out there and find something local. Don't stick to the big five here in Kentucky or, you know, venture out there and taste something different. Um, open those eyes a little bit, you know, and sometimes you gotta hit something besides the bourbon road. You gotta hit the wheat whiskey road or the Irish whiskey road or single malt road, whatever you, whatever tickles your fancy, you know, go out there and venture out a little bit and try something new. You might, you might find something that you totally just dig. Absolutely. Well, Mike, where can people find us on the Internet? You can find us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Man, what else are you going to come up with next?

I don't know, but we'll be there. Good Lord. Keeps us busy.

Keeps us busy, Jim. We also are on Facebook with a private Facebook group called The Bourbon Roadies. 2200 strong and growing every day with like-minded people. Three rules to follow in there. Are you 21? Do you like bourbon? Jim, you like bourbon? I love bourbon. Yeah, I do too. And do you agree to play nice because we don't tolerate any what Jim?

No rudeness. We like people to get along. We don't want anybody coming into our group and slamming somebody because they're posting a picture of a bottle that they got while they were in Oregon, because we think you ought to be able to post what you're drinking, wherever you got it from.

Right? Yeah. I mean, we, we both get on the road, right? And we both bring whiskeys back and we always try to keep an open mind on whiskey. And, um, you know, I think that's where me and you always agree with each other. And we want our group to agree that, Hey, that's the rules we've set forth in this group. Um, post photos of your retirement with whiskey. If you have a member of the family that's passed away and you're celebrating that life, post a photo of that and say, well, I'll say cheers to that person and the great life they lived. Retirement, promotion, whatever's going on in your life, we want to celebrate that. We want to celebrate it with whiskey, with bourbon, with open arms. We welcome you into our group. We hope you join. So that's us.

Yeah. So if you've had a rough time in another group, if you've been slammed or dissed or otherwise made to feel uncomfortable, we've got nothing against bourbon, other bourbon groups. We think they're great. There's a lot of wonderful groups out there, but if you're looking for someplace to call home where you're going to be accepted and treated, as an equal, regardless of what you're drinking, check out the bourbon roadies. Absolutely. Get into Facebook and search the bourbon roadies and sign up and come on in and yeah, it's a great group of people.

The other thing we don't do isn't there is we do not sell whiskey in there. So don't come into our group thinking, hey, I'm going to get to sell some whiskey in there. We got some great moderators that take care of that for us, take care of those people that try to sell that whiskey in there. Um, and I would tell you if you're a roadie, be mindful of people that are trying to sell you whiskey. There's a lot of scammers out there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And the bourbon roadies, it's one strike, you're out. So it's not like three strikes, you're out one strike, you're out. So don't take any chances. Yeah. So how many shows we do a week, Jim? We do two shows a week. We do a short episode like today's, we call it our craft distillery Monday. On every Wednesday, we'll do a longer version, a medium format show, about an hour long, where we'll take a deep dive on a subject, a group of bottles, we'll have a guest on, we'll travel somewhere, we'll do something. All kinds of fun stuff happens on Wednesdays. We'd love to have you listen to both shows every week. And also, in order to make sure that you don't miss a show, what should they do?

Well, you want to scroll it up on whatever app you're listening to us on, hit that subscribe button. It'll let you know that, Hey, these two jokers, they're doing some more shows. They're putting more content out there. And then you're going to scroll on down and we hope you hit that five star review. Otherwise the big bad booty daddy of bourbon, my alter ego is going to bring a bottle to your house. We're going to drink that thing. You never can tell what will happen.

So I'm crazy, crazy, crazy. All right. Well, we always want to know what you guys have to say. There's several ways to reach out to us. You can go to our website where we sell our swag and we have our blog and you can actually listen to the shows there if you want. But we also have an online store there where you can buy our stuff. But there's also a contact us page. And if you just want to reach out to us, that's a great place to do it. You can also write us an email. Mike and I are both Very accessible. I'm jim at the bourbonroad.com. He's mike at the bourbonroad.com. But probably the best way is to reach us on Instagram. I'm jshannon63. I'm one big chief. And we will see you down the bourbon road. You know, you can't drink whiskey without glassware and Mike and I are extremely pleased to have a sponsor like premium bar products. Premium bar products offers direct to consumer, the finest whiskey glasses, cocktail glasses, and bar tools with your own personal engraving. I mean, you can write anything you want on these glasses, anything from a company logo to a personal statement. And there are no minimum orders. Their direct consumer platform offers you the opportunity to purchase small quantities of your favorite glass shapes that enhance the pleasure of enjoyment and drinking a whiskey and make it all very positive. They offer the absolute finest trending and handmade classes as well as a comprehensive range of styles and all of their items have been designed with purpose, practicality and longevity in mind. So if you're a bourbon or whiskey group and you need custom logos, you need to reach out to premium bar products. If you're an individual, you just want a few for your bar to impress your friends, to give out as gifts, you need to call Premium Bar Products. They need to be your one and only source for custom glassware. I can tell you right now, the Bourbon Road, that's who we use. Janie and Carson and the team there at Premium Bar Products will take care of you. They'll treat you like family and they'll take care of you with every order.