Blade and bow owes it’s mystique to a long-gone distillery, but carries on the legacy of the former distillery by shedding light on both it’s past and present. Present? Technically speaking, there is Stitzel-Weller distillate in the Blade and Bow product due to their use of the Solera aging system. While it sounds like a great way to carry the torch into the future, it’s probably important to note that a single drop of Stitzel-Weller distillate in an entire batch is all it would take to make the claim true enough to put on the bottle. How much of the coveted juice is actually being blended into this product is anyone’s guess. Moving on…

The name itself is interesting. Having hung their hat on the famous Stitzel-Weller brand name already, it makes sense that Blade and Bow is also utilizing more of the former distillery’s history in their lore. From the Blade and Bow website:

Named after the two parts of a skeleton key, the blade shaft and the ornate bow, the Blade and Bow brand is a tribute to the five keys that once hung on the door of the Stitzel-Weller Distillery.

These keys represented the five steps of crafting bourbon—grains, yeast, fermentation, distillation and aging.

But more importantly, they grew to symbolize the southern traditions of hospitality, warmth and enjoying the finer things in life.

This particular bourbon came recommended to us by our good friends at Savage Jerky as it is a personal daily favorite of theirs. We scooped up a few bottles to give it a try. Here’s what we thought:

If you’re experiencing Blade and Bow for the first time, we think you’ll find some unique flavors in it. The price isn’t sky high, and there’s decent value in there. You can collect the keys that dangle from the neck of the bottle and join the Blade and Bow Five Keys Club which will get your name added to their hall of fame at Stitzel-Weller, evidently. This used to be a club where they would send you a lock to commemorate the completion of the key collection, but that was quite obviously not sustainable once the bourbon picked up more popularity. While we wont be clearing space in The Bourbon Finder Bunker to stock up on Blade and Bow, we did enjoy it, and think it would make for a great bottle to bring out when entertaining as there’s a lot of history to discuss and it’s an easy sipper. Cheers!

This bottle is available now at Keg N Bottle

Our grading system: As mentioned in our About Us page, we’re excited to share bourbon with our friends, family, and readers. There are enough critics, cynics, and curmudgeons in the whiskey world as it is. Our goal is to foster the bourbon community in a positive way by bringing fun and entertaining content whenever possible, and as such we decided early on that applying precise scores to whiskey was simply too serious for us. We use a simple grade school system to apply a grade to the whiskeys we review because it is indicative of the whiskey’s grade for us on that particular day. A grade of a “B” today may very well be a “B+” or even a “B-” on another day. Pour a bit and enjoy, these are the good old days of whiskey!