Great explanation. Thanks!What you purchased is "white dog", which is basically unaged whiskey. A lot of the small boutique distillers are selling this, with catchy "moonshine" inspired names, because it is a cash flow product: distill it, bottle it and sell it. Most of these outfits aren't heavily capitalized, so they can't survive four years of outgo and no revenue waiting for real whiskey to mature. Whiskey is essentially a lower distillation proof grain spirit that is then aged in oak barrels (of varying characteristics, depending on the whiskey), but this aging takes time, as in several years. The white dog, or unaged spirit, doesn't have much character when it goes into the barrel; the lovely flavors of whiskey, especially bourbon, come mainly from the extended barrel contact. There have been many attempts to devise a method of speeding up the process of imparting the brown flavors of the barrel into whiskey, but no one has yet come up with a suitable substitute for extended time in a charred oak barrel.
About the best that can be said for your bottle of white dog is that it is probably OK for mixing in some drinks and likely does have a bit more flavor than most vodka, but that might not be necessarily be all pleasant flavor. Oh, and it does have alcohol, so there is that.
Great pun and highly appropriate!!It just comes off as a marketing gimmick I think. No one here in Tennessee really takes this stuff too seriously..we know good whiskey and this isn't a great example of it. Mostly produced for tourists. But..again like anything else, there will be those who really take a "shine" (now is that a bad pun??) to it.
