The Bastard's Blend
The first Original Subtle Spirits bottling was called the Spicy Bastard and released in December 2018. This was before I left my job as a whiskey buyer and committed to starting my own spirits brand. I wanted to legitimize the sticker game and test the concept of commissioning Original artwork for prominent use on a spirits label. The barrel I selected was a single cask of California malt whiskey from Charbay Distillery. When I first tasted it with Marko and his father, Miles from Charbay, they had affectionately given the nickname Spicy Bastard to the particular barrel I chose. The painting created for the label depicted a fictitious character called the Spicy Bastard. People said it looked like me. Maybe it did? But it was Monty’s creation, and I never asked my friend, the artist, about it.
Fast-forward to the beginning of 2022, when we began our first official year in the market, producing and distributing our product. We met Jun Yang through the local SF art community. At that time, he was painting in a more neo-expressionist style – depicting images of faces, animals, and plants using bright and exaggerated colors. Many of his pieces use varied and improvisational brush strokes and swipes of a palette knife. They were vivid, intense, and full of soul.
As the pandemic wore on, Jun began transitioning into a more abstract expressionist approach to his work, leaning heavily on portraits, all characterized by a lot of emotion. This was a difficult time for all of us, leaving many feeling isolated and depressed, and the portraits Jun painted reflected that. Since this painting was completed, he has morphed again out of brooding abstraction, reintegrating the styles of his past and improvising them with the identities and cultural messages of the present.
Jun grew up in Seoul, South Korea, before immigrating to the US fifteen years ago. I shared with Jun that I had an adopted brother, Benjamin, who was also born in South Korea, and that I, too, was adopted. We came up with the idea of him painting an abstract portrait inspired by the blended family my brother and I share. We gave Jun our photos as inspiration for the piece. The intended name for this release was Adoptation – a made-up word combining the words adapt and adoption. We even got a COLA approved from the TTB for the label.
The previous year, I made Quixotic, Full Circle, and Paper Trail, after which I was left with three empty marriage casks I used in blending them, along with some leftover portions of whiskey that didn’t make the blends. Needing something to do with these leftover components, I began assembling three different casks: a rye, a bourbon, and one with bourbon and rye. This continued for about a year and a half in what could be referred to as a solera-like blending method.
Solera is a process for aging liquids such as wine, vinegar, or spirits by fractional blending, done in a way that the finished product is a mixture of ages, with the average age gradually increasing as the process continues over many years. Solera means "on the ground" in Spanish, which refers to the lower level of the set of barrels or other containers used in the process. The process is labor-intensive but maintains a reliable style and quality over time. The liquid is traditionally transferred from barrel to barrel, top to bottom, the oldest being in the barrel right "on the ground."
As the year continued, I added some whiskey from nearly every barrel we bottled to one of these three marriage casks in volumes ranging from 500 mL to a few gallons. Eventually, they each started to develop some profoundly unique and different flavor profiles. We debated whether to bottle the three different casks separately, especially #13, which Kristen had aptly called the KC Barrel because she wanted it for herself. The volume on these casks was barely enough to do much with, so one late night, I decided to blend some of each barrel and see what happened. The initial result was confounding, hard to describe or ascertain the exact provenance. It became more complex and exciting as the whiskies melded together and rested in glass. It was too unique not to bottle.
We had just released Stellar and were entering the densely scheduled holiday season. One late night in December, as we were tweaking the label and staring at the Jun Yang piece next to the Spicy Bastard, it became obvious.
“No one can say this damn name! Adoptation! Even I can’t say it, and I came up with it! I always just end up calling this one Jun Yang anyway.”
And then it dawned on me. All of these remanent whiskies found their way into foster homes before eventually finding their one real true family and place to call home for good. A blended family. Just like mine. It made even more sense when looking at each portrait side by side. They have a similar rawness and sadness, yet strikingly different approaches, one abstract and fuzzy, the other defined and surreal. The Spicy Bastard was a single barrel, and this new Jun Yang piece was quite the abstract blend. I realized that the name of this whiskey should be called the Bastard’s Blend. Maybe the Spicy Bastard painting was inspired by me after all.
That's the thing about your past. It has a way of showing who you are through where you’ve been and where you came from. As time passes, our identities may transition into new identities, sometimes blended with whispers of our past and glimmers from our future — just like this whiskey, which contains both the remnants of my past and drops from the future.
Bastard’s Blend was blended from over 40 different whiskies over a year-and-a-half-long period. Made from both the 95/5 and 51/49 rye mashbills from MGP in Indiana and four different bourbon mashbills – two from Indiana and two from Kentucky. The average age of the whiskey is 7.7 years. The blend was assembled in three different casks – a re-used sherry cask, a second-fill pinot noir cask, and a second-fill American oak cask. It was then vatted in another second-fill American oak cask, where it was mixed together. It was bottled on July 19, 2023, with minimal filtration. The blend yielded just 44 gallons, producing 222 total 750 mL bottles, all bottled and labeled by hand.
Bastard’s Blend – Last Fill
Last Fill Bottle Char
For those curious about the blending process, we created two unique sets for this release: The last 36 bottles from the cask showed an impressive amount of barrel char. These Last Fill bottles are more intense and rich in flavor, showing a significant difference in texture compared to the rest of the cask. Last Fill sets are paired with one 50mL regular bottle for appropriate comparison. Before vatting the blend, we pulled whiskey from each of the three marriage casks: #9, #11, and #13. These are available only in 50 mL size as a part of 15 Deconstructed sets. Each Deconstructed set contains a 750 mL bottle of regular Bastard’s Blend and four 50 mL bottles – one from each of the barrels, #9, #11, and #13, along with a 50 mL of Last Fill. Each set is packaged in custom-painted tubes.
Bastard’s Blend Deconstructed