“Tell it to me again,” Robin said. They were sitting in her kitchen with an open bottle of something called Black Maple Hill on the table between them. It was the color of very good, very expensive mahogany furniture and it tasted of cherries and caramel and wood smoke. They apparently aged the stuff for 21 years in white oak barrels down in Kentucky, and Albert paid about two hundred dollars a bottle for it. So far they’d downed a good hundred bucks’ worth. Finney had never cared much for bourbon, but he thought it was pretty much the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted.
That’s the introduction Ray Finney gets to Black Maple Hill bourbon in my just-published crime novel, Thanks for Killing Me. Finney’s a con man, and he’s good at it, but you could say he lacks what the professionals call “emotional intelligence.” That is, he’s the kind of guy who can be undone by a pretty face, and in Robin Tandy he’s more than met his match. Finney doesn’t know it yet, but Robin’s about to outsmart him, and all she needs is her brains and a bottle.
Not just any bottle, though. This is kind of a turning point in the story, and when I got to it in the writing I knew I needed a particular kind of spirit to make it turn. It needed to be smoothly, compulsively drinkable; it needed to be somewhat rare; it needed a flavor profile complex enough that Finney could plausibly spend a pivotal chapter trying to figure it out. There was really one spirit for the job, and I knew almost immediately that Black Maple Hill was it.
It’s almost incidental to this story that Black Maple Hill was the bourbon that turned me into a bourbon lover, because really, who cares? What’s much more relevant, and what made it a key player—the third character, in a way, in chapter five of my book—was this: Here was a drink that could plausibly mesmerize a guy who didn’t know anything about bourbons, as I hadn’t before I discovered it.
A good bourbon can do that to you. Black Maple Hill can do it in spades. Even in its base version, which is aged about eight years and sells for right around $40 a bottle, it’s smooth going down and rich in the sweetness that corn brings to its grain bill. There are also 14- , 16- and 21-year-old versions. (I picked the 21 for the book because it’s the top of the line, hard to find now, and would have plausibly been the choice of the guy who bought it, a fatuous oligarch named Tandy.) Really, any of the bottlings is delicious. Bourbon lovers will argue about whether the additional years in white oak give the 14 a perceptible edge over the 8, the 16 over the 14, the 21 over the 16. Discussions like these are, of course, part of what’s fun about a devotion to spirits. What all the bottlings have in common, though, is a satiny finish, a pleasantly light burn on the tongue (there seems to be less than the usual complement of rye, which gives some bourbons a more peppery character), and a balance of flavors and notes that can keep your palate enjoyably occupied for hours, or until you pass out. I taste vanilla, caramel, and something fruity that suggests apricot or black cherries. You might taste butterscotch, or honey. We might argue about it, in an amiable way.
“Are you getting, like, a hint of apple in this bourbon?”
“A little,” she said. “Keep going.”
“Right,” he said, slugging a big mouthful back. Maybe it wasn’t apples at all. Maybe it was apricots. There was also a definite burnt-nuts thing going on. You could spend your life trying to figure this stuff out, he thought.
This is exactly what I love about bourbon: It’s a puzzle of flavors. It spawns argument and analysis. At that, Black Maple Hill is more puzzling than most. There’s even controversy among aficionados about whose distillery actually produces the stuff. My friend Ron Givens, author of Bourbon at its Best, one of the indispensable texts on the subject, directed me to this post on Chuck Cowdery’s whiskey blog about Black Maple Hill’s provenance. Bottom line: It may or may not be produced by the distillers of Heaven Hill, which produces a wide variety of specialty bourbons. Ron further speculates that it may have been produced by other hands at other times.
Could there be a better spirit to use as the maguffin in a mystery novel? I can’t imagine there could. I only know that if it works at all in my book, and I encourage you to buy the book and judge for yourself, preferably in enormous quantities (the holidays are coming), it works because it’s a prime, delicious exemplar of the bourbon distiller’s art. Which is to say: You can study it, savor it, deconstruct it, as Finney does…
He was almost positive he was tasting a dash of brown sugar. And wasn’t that what butterscotch was, basically—brown sugar? But they melted it or something, he was pretty sure. The bourbon felt like a bolt of liquid velvet sliding down the back of his throat. Clearly, his palate was getting more and more sophisticated the more of the stuff he drank. There was only an inch or two left in the bottle, which struck him as very sad.
And maybe you’ll kill the bottle. But you’ll never get to the bottom of it.
Bill Barol’s Thanks for Killing Me is available now in paperback and ebook at Amazon, and also at the iTunes Music Store and barnesandnoble.com. More information can be found at thanksforkillingme.com.
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