Crown Royal is a whiskey (in their case, whisky) brand that has impressively achieved the greatest trick in the spirits industry over the last couple of decades: Pricing itself as a relative bottom-to-mid-shelf brand, while retaining perception as a “premium” brand in the eyes of the center slice, everyday consumer demographic it targets. Seasoned whiskey geeks? They don’t typically think much of something like Crown Royal; in fact they’re not likely to think about the Diageo brand at all. They’re chasing cask strength bourbon and sherry bomb single malt scotches. They’re not the Crown Royal demo–the demo is the occasional drinker who wants the perception of luxury (the velvet bag!) without paying too much for it. Someone who wants a whiskey they can just as easily mix or easily drink neat if they want to look cool in front of their friends. I feel like that’s the consumer base the brand had in mind when they were designing the new Crown Royal Single Malt Whisky, and in truth I think they might have pulled off exactly what they were going for.
It feels kind of odd, in retrospect, that Crown Royal as a brand didn’t already have some sort of single malt whisky product. You have to remember that their core expression is a blended Canadian whiskey, a style that is created through the blending of many different mash bills utilizing different grains, finished in a wide array of different finishing casks. Presumably, there could have been a single malt at some point if they had wanted to pull some of those malt whiskey casks, but one thing in particular here in the scant details provided by the brand stands out: This is aged in newly charred oak, rather than reused American whiskey casks. That likely makes the final product ultimately more akin to many of the emergent American single malts in its construction, rather than a riff on malt whisky from Scotland, Ireland, etc. You can’t help but draw a parallel to Diageo’s own Bulleit Single Malt, which also launched earlier this year.
Regardless, the marketing for Crown Royal Single Malt Whisky is a bit on the odd side, focusing almost entirely on “cold” imagery as a result of its Canadian origins. It’s evocative of something like the Coors Light “Cool Train” aesthetic. The company says it was “delicately created in the Canadian cold,” though I would have used “carefully” for maximum alliterative overkill. It’s bottled at a modest 45% ABV (90 proof) and carries a $55 MSRP, which is a scant $5 below the Bulleit offering. Like the Bulleit one, it’s non-age-stated–a bit of a curious choice for a company that could certainly afford to put out a moderately aged product, but probably in keeping with the lack of age statements on other core Crown Royal bottles. It’s a bit hard to say whether this MSRP is reasonable or not, existing as it now does in a world with 23-year-old, apple-flavored Crown Royal expressions that retail for $250. That kind of stuff has effectively broken the ability to gauge reasonable prices.
So with that said, let’s get to tasting this stuff and see how it registers to the American palate.