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| - This is a mixed review - for the distillery & tour and the product they make.
Starting with the distillery and tour - they do a nice job. The tours are only on Friday every other week, so be careful if you are planning a trip there (check the schedules and book in advance). The tour is generally led by Tom, the founder, but I have a friend who said someone else gave his tour. Tom is proud of his unique way of faking the aging process, and there are a few tricks they employ which you can't see (IP protection). I found the tour to be informative, though a little preachy and a bit arrogant about how "our process creates the equivalent of a 10 year aged bourbon in a much shorter time.".
Distillery & Tour - 3 stars - tone down on the attitude and it might be 4 stars.
Then you get to taste the product - sorry, I have a tough time calling it bourbon. It technically meets the requirement of being called bourbon because it is aged for 6 months in charred oak barrels. So basically meets the minimum. Then they employ their special techniques to supposedly speed the aging process.
As a consumer of Bourbon, I have tried maybe 70 or 80 different brands and variants and have 14 different bottles at home right now (as well as 2 different Tennessee whiskeys, 7 Scotchs, and a couple American Single Malts).
I found Cleveland Whiskey to be very harsh with a burn upon smelling and tasting. And to me it had a lingering taste of burnt wood and chemicals. I was willing to give this a try because I look for alternatives and options, but I could not justify spending $30+ for something I really didn't like.
So my opinion is, as they state in the commercial from the '70s - "you can't fool Mother Nature." In this case it is my belief (though I don't have the expertise to state this with certainty) that the aging process is much more than forcing the extraction of the elements of the oak into the bourbon. It is a much more complex process that in this case was not duplicated.
Product - 1 star
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