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🥃Review #87: Four Roses Single Barrel - OBSV

Four Roses has long been praised for the quality and consistency of its single barrel editions. They currently release a number of their ten recipes as single barrels, but this is from the original OBSV recipe "standard" bottling that is most prevalent. If you're not familiar with Four Roses recipe codes they follow a structured format: Distillery - "O" for all recipes, meaning distilled at Four Roses Distillery Mash Bill - either "B" (60% Corn, 35% Rye, 5% Barley) or "E"(75% Corn, 20% Rye, 5% Barley) Straight Whiskey - "S" for all editions Yeast Strain - V(Delicate Fruit), K(Spice), O (Rich Fruit, Q(Floral),or F(Herbal). The combination of the two mashes and five yeasts yields 10 possible variations. If your head isn't already spinning, Four Roses also includes the exact warehouse aging location for each single barrel. This one is from Rickhouse TS and has the code 49-3C which means rick/row number 39, tier 3 (height), and pos...
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🔌Review - Costco's Kirkland Sparkling Energy Drink - Tropical Flavor

Released in Q1 2026, the Kirkland Sparkling Energy Drink lineup features three flavors: Orange , Tropical, and Peach. The style, ingredients, and caffeine content are chasing a similar value proposition to Celsius Energy. The packaging evokes that brands "clean" veneer with no high fructose corn syrup, GMO ingredients, or artificial colorings.  🛒 Price:  $16.99/24 ~$.7/each - Costco. Celsius is normally around $20/12 without sales, so figure around 95 cents savings per can vs. full sticker which is around 58% savings. Celsius is showing up frequently on sale around $15 now but that's still not nearly enough to reach parity.  ✨Calories:  10 ,  12oz. can 🍵 Caffeine:  200mg, around a third more than a cup of coffee, more than Monster and Red Bull - similar to Celsius. 👅 Flavor: Semi-sweet citrus and pineapple forward but with lots of mango that stays into the aftertaste. Starfruit is pictured but I think it sits under the pineapple, adding a little bit fore...

☕Review - Cometeer - Gravity Wave Bonfire Espresso

  This lovely pink edition from one of Cometeer's own house brands is designed to show off the competence of their internal roasting capabilities. Bonfire Espresso seeks to maximize versatility, performing similar to a high-viscosity espresso shot while remaining balanced enough for a casual black cup.   If you are not familiar with Cometeer's process, they use a precision brew system to make a strong coffee, 400ish pounds of bean at a time, concentrate at roughly 10x final strength that is then flash frozen at -321 degrees. They typically work with Roasters individually to perfect the settings for each brew.  🌍 Origin:  Blend of Jaen from North Peru and Huila Columbia 🔥 Roast Level:   Dark, they did a great job with this one. It's a very sturdy dark roast and has plenty of the biting flavors that you'd expect from an espresso roast but still retains enough of a fruited aspect to be interesting. 🧪 Brew Method:  Cometeer Pod, 6oz water added, also tr...

🔌Review - Monster Energy - Ultra Punk Punch

With can art depicting raging speakers, skateboards, skulls, and lightning, Monster Energy's Punk Punch is part of the low calorie Ultra lineup and brings with it a fruity flare, semisweet and still with that classic Ultra bend tingle. It's basically a zero-sugar version of the previous "Pacific Punch" offering, a deeper cut favorite of many. Monster rolled out Punk Punch in early 2026 and anecdotally sales seem to be pretty solid. 🛒 Price:  $3.75  - Academy Sports and Outdoors ✨Calories:  10 ,  16oz. can 🍵 Caffeine:  150mg, slightly less than a cup of coffee 👅 Flavor:  About what you'd expect for fruit punch plus a bit of the underlying Ultra Citrus to which we're all accustomed. Pineapple, Orange, Apple, and some sort of red fruit, perhaps cherry or strawberry. It's a little less bright and and has less bite than the standard Ultra, closer to a carbonated Hawaiian punch.  🧪 Ingredients:  Around the same as the rest of Monster's Ultra editio...

🥃Review #86: George Dickel 12Year Bottled-in-Bond 2024 Distilled Spring 2011

Produced by Cascade Hollow Distilling Company in Tullahoma, Tennessee, George Dickel is a Diageo property and this 12-year-old bottled-in-bond has consistently challenged expectations for what 10+ year whisky should cost. This offering as well as a number of high-age single barrels were the brainchild of one Nicole Austin who became the general manager and lead distiller of Cascade Hollow in March 2018, having previously worked in Ireland and in New York as a master blender. Dickel first introduced this offering in 2019 and it quickly amassed some reasonable hardware across multiple spirits competitions. George A. Dickel, a German immigrant, was an successful Nashville merchant when he entered the whisky wholesale business, garnering a reputation for selling some of the smoothest, most mellow spirits in the region. Dickel always spelled whisky without the "e" believing that American brands should strive to the excellence of producers in Scotland. of  When the Cascade Hollow ...