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Bourbon is not a spirit you mess with. You either like it or you don’t. That’s why we called in the experts to taste our Four Roses collection.

We hit the jackpot and scored three bottles of the bourbon: Four Roses Original, Four Roses Single Barrel and Four Roses Small Batch. To make sure we gave every bottle a fair chance, we set up a blind tasting with our bourbon purists. Here are their expert opinions:

Original: We couldn’t fool them with this one. From the first sniff, they could tell this was the cheapest of the three. The taste was slightly sweet with maple hints but had a harsh finish. We didn’t expect much at $22 per bottle though.

Small Batch:  The small batch was a pleasant surprise. It was a great balance of sweet fruit flavors with a strong but smooth finish. All of our bourbon lovers said they would recommend this blend over the others for its taste and scotch like qualities. Added bonus: the small batch is only $40, a great price for quality bourbon.

Single Barrel: As the highest quality and most expensive ($56) of the group, this bourbon was pretty good. It had vanilla and honey notes, with a mellow finish that made it very easy to sip. Even our less experienced bourbon drinkers liked this special edition.  We probably wouldn’t buy it… but we didn’t hate drinking it.

Overall we’d recommend Four Roses Small Batch – you can probably skip the others. Have you tried Four Roses? What did you think?