Maker’s Mark Private Select – Single Barrel Store Pick!

MAKER’S MARK PRIVATE SELECT
Selected by Sam Salfiti of Save More Market, San Francisco (2019)

MASH BILL – 70% corn, 16% wheat, 14% malted Barley

PROOF – 109.8

AGE – NAS (~6 years)

DISTILLERY – Maker’s Mark

PRICE – $76

WORTH BUYING? – Yes

Uncorked and tasted in The Year of No Buying (The what? 🔗 here.)

With its genius marketing gesture—that instantly recognizable red wax—Maker’s Mark is easily among the most iconic Kentucky bourbons. This made the standard Maker’s release a habitual go-to for me early on.

For example, during a theater production I was involved with in 2015 (about a year before the conscious start of my whiskey journey) I went to a corner store en route to the venue and bought the most obvious bourbon on the shelf, for use as our nightly post-performance shot. We would come off stage after taking our bows, sweaty and high off the adrenaline and applause, hastily fill our shot glasses, toast the night’s work, and toss it back. For that circumstance, standard Maker’s was fine. It was bourbon. We were amped up. We were punctuating another night of the show and not really paying the whiskey much attention.

But whenever I would sit down with a glass of standard Maker’s at home, I found it displeasingly medicinal. I tried the cask strength version and that only thickened the medicinal edge. I liked Maker’s 46 better. It had a more interesting spiciness to it from the added wood staves, and none of that medical business. But even the 46 didn’t summon much interest for me.

So when my whiskey journey did formally kick into gear in 2016, Maker’s Mark was not on my list. But then…

…The Wood Finishing Series came along and I began to take notice. The 2021 FAE-01 really impressed me—sweet, creamy, floral, herbal, spicy, unique. And though its sequel, the FAE-02, didn’t quite hit as brilliantly, still it was a legitimately enjoyable sip. I then jumped back in time a year to the 2020 SE4 x PR5 release. Its awkward and easily forgotten Star Wars robot name didn’t do justice to the memorable whiskey in the bottle. In any case, by now my interest in Maker’s Mark had been sparked, specifically around these higher-end variations on the Maker’s 46 wood stave finishing concept.

I bought this Save More pick in 2019 out of guilt for having visited the shop so often around then without buying anything. Save More does have an unusually interesting range of whiskeys for an otherwise unassuming corner store. Like many corner stores though, the pricing at Save More has steadily migrated north of piracy—an irony given the store’s name! I haven’t shopped there much in the past few years as a result. But with my renewed interest in Maker’s Mark, this dusty 2019 bottle called out to me from the bunker.

So here we are, just over seven weeks after uncorking and a handful of pours into the bottle. These brief notes were taken using a traditional Glencairn.

COLOR – medium rusty orange with fiery and gold highlights

NOSE – fresh cinnamon baking spices, vanilla, caramel, dry oak and oak spice, a strawberry and apricot compote

TASTE – the caramel and fruit compote nicely blended and balanced, with the oak notes etching a nice supporting line under it all

FINISH – warm, with baked strawberry and cherry, faint oak and oak spice, and a nice mocha note wafting in and out

OVERALL – a sweet fruit pie of a whiskey served up on an old oak porch

Perfectly great. If this were an official Maker’s Wood Finishing Series release, many people would be happy with it. It might lack the extra pizzaz or richness of some of those releases. But for the price range these store picks generally fall under, it’s a very worthy purchase for fans of sweeter bourbons.

Sam Salfiti chose a potpourri of wood staves for his pick. What in theory could have been a confused or overeager mess has achieved great balance. The vanilla, caramel, and fruit notes all stand side by side, with the oak notes offering just enough dryness and bitterness to hold the sweets back from cloying.

I want to drink this alongside coffee. I want to sip it with a homemade cherry pie or berry cobbler. This could also be the dessert itself, served after a hearty meal of herbed chicken or baked pork loin. It will work in any season, offering just enough heat to warm a winter’s chill, enough brightness of flavor to match spring’s enlivening light, enough sweetness to pair with summer’s sunbaked fun, and enough oak to connect with autumn’s earthiness.

Maybe these picks don’t get the same gushes on the social meds as other whiskeys because Maker’s is such a ubiquitous presence, its standard release a common fixture on the bottom shelves of every corner store. But for anyone tired of chasing “unicorns,” a Maker’s Mark Private Select offers excellent quality, richness, and due to the variances of stave selection from store pick to store pick, a bit of adventure as well.

Cheers!