>>21439175
>>21439187
>>21439170
big gay rant on why people like weller and what to look for/why:
a lot of this can be handled with bar pours. for one thing, you can order something you already like and use it as an immediate baseline to figure out if these reputed noses and flavors are really all there.
this is just me, but as bad a rep as it gets, the 12 is the one where you can figure out what people are talking about and make a decision. the BT distillery (until the distillate from the new still hits its age here in a few years and everything goes south like with wild turkey) is old, funky and has some unique characteristics that come out at a decent age. the pappies and 12 have an orange/cherry/old-attic-funk that really is pretty unique and good. the other wellers are like a methodone for them and you can find it and enjoy it a little bit if you know what you're looking for. 107 and FP have a little more because the whiskey is more concentrated.
wild turkey used to have a kind of similarly unique funky profile and arguably better before they hiked their entry proof and threw the ancient ripy brothers still in the trash and now it tastes like everything else unless they baby some really special barrels.
the truth is that these get (in WT's case *got* it - the recent award winning 15 was the last off of the old still) hype because they're old and weird compared to the rest of the market. everyone else is using a brand new vendome at this point, and although they can make some choices to separate the product it all tastes the same. heaven hill's new bernheim plant uses nutty beam yeast and a column from the 90s and it mostly just gets newer from there. You used to have old heaven hill that tasted like mushy concentrated peaches, national distillers crow/granddad that tasted like plummy butterscotch, stitzel weller that tasted like old books and syrupy leather, and all of it's gone now.
so anyway that's why people like, or at least the basis for liking weller,