West Bottoms Kansas City Whiskey: Authentic Enjoyment in Inauthentic Times
This is adapted from the script of Episode 99, Battle Card Review + Meet The Lads of “War With a Mate”
I was slugging some Michelob Ultra in the evening and wanted something else to complement the thrill of pushing the Germans out of Eindhoven and remembered I had a bottle of West Bottoms Whiskey Company’s Kansas City Whiskey in the cabinet.
My old college bro Baetz dropped it off during the Colorado leg of a road trip that took him from California to Missouri and back. Dude blasted an extra three hours off his planned route to show up with a bottle, some ribs to throw on the grill, and a hose.
Well, he didn’t bring the hose. He picked that up for me after he sold me on the idea of showering outside whenever possible. “Fuck cleaning a shower and fuck paying for water that only goes down the drain” was his general pitch. He lives in a respectable residential area in the Bay Area, but he built himself a privacy screen on his back deck and showers out there because he doesn’t give a shit and he’s still got that Missouri in him.
Why hadn’t this occurred to me as I explored the many liberating country bachelor life hacks I’ve acquired since 2020? Why couldn’t I have seized the glory of this fantastic redneck hygiene practice? I tried it out the day after he left and I haven’t showered inside once since then. Nor have I had a proper sit with the bottle.
West Bottoms up: Inconclusive early taste with the bearer of the whiskey.
At 94 proof, the first sip was a wallop, delivering a steady burn and not much else from snout to tail. I liked it. After weeks of just Michelob Ultra to keep from being simply unspooled by the heat, I was ready for a drink that said something, even if it was an airhorn to the face.
Second sip: The burn started to show me the friends it brought along, including the more urbane bite of the rye peeking out. That’s what’s promised on the bottle, along with “notes of Olarosa Sherry.” I’m not sure if that’s what gave it that minor band of sweetness I got on the third sip or not.
The bottle additionally sold itself as a “pre-Prohibition Kansas City whiskey,” which struck a suspicious note. I’ve noted that when craft distilleries can’t list a real moustachioed Kentucky bourbon don in their pedigree, they always make this play: Tease the ideal customer with amber scenes of dudes hammering the keys at juke joints and sunsets on massive cattle pens and sparks flying off train brakes so they feel like real American men in a tasteful and obliquely patriotic way.
A lot of “Inspired by” talk. It’s ingratiating. I don’t need that. What’s going on in my little shooter is enough. This is an interesting recipe. The flavors are banded and muscular and don’t try too hard to disappear into each other.
MORNING-AFTER NOTE: This drink is actually made in Kansas City. In a tunnel right in the heart of the storied commercial district they’re talking about. What did I expect them to do, in all fairness? Brand it as the drink of Arctic explorers or Bedouin traders or curling teams? What got into me when I wrote this riff about their completely common-sense brand? Cynicism. Fatigue at seeing everything that connects any two actions in time a “journey.” The “hero story” bullshit and pat transformation stories that plague my LinkedIn feed. Pastel animation selling usurious consumer financing. The collapsing of historical perspective in the wind tunnel of digital memory, leaving a shrinking shorthand of vaguely nostalgic images or reels that increasingly point at mysterious and forgotten tundras. Burgeoning sewers of calculated, synthetic marketing communication everywhere, moving format to format like a starved beast as it devours one medium after another in its mimicry. None of that is the drink’s fault. I like the drink. I also saved some of the bottle so I could see how it behaves in a mixed drink of some kind. Keep an eye out for that.
I got other effects at the tail end that were interesting and subtle, but there’s no use paying attention to them because a) I’m a dabbler whose written vocabulary far outstrips his sensory discernment b) I was still impressed by the alcohol content and how loud that rye flavor clapped its cymbals in my face. This drink felt like real decisions were made.
Also my sinuses stopped up like cement after the third taste. Maybe I’m allergic to the real legacy of Midwestern turn-of-the-century America. There went my dreams of sliding a straight razor in the pocket of my overalls and…getting a DUI two blocks from my house in my vintage Wagoneer with the real wood paneling, sobbing in the backseat behind the plexiglass of the cruiser as I watch a team in a cherry picker rig swap out a 30’ high Cracker Barrel sign back to the old logo in a nearby parking lot and the officer calls in the tow, telling me that I seem like a good guy and it’s a real shame.
This drink succeeds despite my gripes about the world I saw in the label. Its true package was the surprise of its arrival and transfer: A V6 Sable hitting my driveway at dusk and a real no-bullshit flavor gifted to me by a no-bullshit kind of dude.
Thanks for coming through and being a real one, Baetz.