Tasting notes

nose

Demerara sugar and cinnamon, cocoa powder, dusty oak and baked peach

palate

Oily and sweet up front, with fig, toffee pudding and cinnamon-roll dough giving way to stone fruit, biscuit and a light frame of oak

finish

Medium-long and warming; peach and tropical fruit linger with marzipan and nutmeg before a cool lift of mint

Mash bill

The grain recipes of the seven straight bourbons in this blend have not been published. Milam & Greene's own bourbon recipe, used on its Blanco pot still and by its team in Bardstown, is 70% corn, 22% malted rye and 8% malted barley, but the company has not said which of the seven components are made to it. The blend draws on Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas bourbon, and the Tennessee component is bought in.

Why it's craft

Unabridged is Milam & Greene's blender's series, and Volume 5 combines seven straight bourbon casks from Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas at cask strength, without chill filtration. The final recipe was picked in a blind tasting, by the production team, local bourbon club members and writer Fred Minnick, not by the blender alone. Milam & Greene, founded in Blanco in 2019, distills some of its bourbon on its own pot still, buys the rest, and gives the barrels their last stretch of aging in the Hill Country heat.