Stillhouse Black Bourbon

I’m listening to a lot of G-Eazy right now, the Bay Area rapper who was once famously referred to as “the James Dean of hip-hop,” not because he’s on my most played list (there’s a whole lot of talk about having sex with other people’s girlfriends that I simply can’t relate to), but because he’s the creative director behind Stillhouse Spirits, which makes a handful of whiskies in Tennessee, from an unaged recipe to a far out mint chocolate chip-flavored whiskey. All of them are packaged in these slick cans, which look like a cross between an old school Stanley flask and a gas can. I’m a sucker for good packaging, so I’m automatically intrigued when I see the can of Stillhouse Black Bourbon, which is “mellowed” on coffee beans.

Apparently, this is the first bourbon to be rested on coffee beans. I’m not sure how the world produced a mint chocolate whiskey before a coffee bourbon, but whatever. No judgments here. Get your mint chocolate chip buzz on if that’s what you want.

Anyway, back to this particular can of whiskey. Stillhouse took a traditional Tennessee approach to whiskey, using mostly corn in the mash bill, aging it in charred new oak barrels before charcoal filtering it to provide a distinctly mellow taste. Then they rested the bourbon on coffee beans (apparently G-Eazy is a coffee fanatic who grinds his own beans every morning). Because of that last step, I expected to find coffee characteristics in every corner of this whiskey, but that’s not the case at all. This is a mellow bourbon first, cup of Starbucks second.