Left Bank Straight Bourbon Whisky is the history of bourbon in a bottle.
This spirit is distilled and aged on the banks of the Ohio River in Kentucky. Then it takes a winding journey by barrel on the river to New Orleans, where it is carefully married into small batches and bottled.
When you sip Left Bank, an essence of vanilla, caramel, honey, and spice give you a "Kentucky hug" with each swallow. Each flavor profile seeps into the spirit during the bourbon-making process as the charred barrels of whisky are finished with French oak staves and "tortured" by heat, movement, and age.
Left Bank finishes its aging process with a one-way journey from Kentucky to New Orleans that includes days of sloshing around in a boat. This movement ensures that more of the whisky is interacting with the wood and is much more dynamic than merely resting in a warehouse until the day a barrel gets dumped into a giant vat.
We add our own unique blend of oak barrel staves to every batch and barrel of Left Bank Bourbon. We add these right before the journey so the whisky has up to 40% more oak from which to pick up flavor and color.
These staves include heavily charred oak, heavily toasted oak, and French oak staves. The combination makes the perfectly balanced flavor that is Left Bank Bourbon.
The graph to the left shows the expanded flavor range that Left Bank achieves through its process. The blue figure shows the baseline flavors in a control barrel, and the orange figure shows the more complex tasting experience we achieve by starting with a good bourbon, adding our staves, floating it down the rivers, and carefully blending the barrels together into very small batches.
Ingredients:
Start by filling a copper mug or a highball glass with ice cubes. The copper mug is traditional for Moscow Mules, but any glass will work fine. Add the fresh mint leaves to the glass. Gently muddle the mint leaves with a muddler or the back of a spoon. This helps release the mint's flavor without completely tearing the leaves. Squeeze the juice of half a lime (about 1/2 oz) into the glass. Feel free to adjust the amount of lime juice to your taste preference. Pour the 2 oz of bourbon into the glass over the muddled mint and lime juice. Top up the glass with 4-6 oz of ginger beer, depending on how strong you want the cocktail to be. You can always add more or less ginger beer to suit your taste. Give the cocktail a gentle stir to mix all the ingredients together. Garnish the cocktail with a lime slice and a sprig of mint. This adds a nice touch and enhances the presentation.
