Peanut butter whiskey brands are a thing, and you just need to get used to it because, like Fireball and Jepsum’s (FUCK!) Bourbon and a million other Cthulian horrors of the whiskey trade they’re here to stick. Whiskey. Made with peanut butter. Here, let me hold your hair . . .
I’m sure you know it isn’t made from actual peanut butter. Nobody in Kentucky is loading legumes into a copper pot still. Peanut butter whiskey brands sell whiskey made from a fat wash, just like bacon bourbon or duck fat rye (which is not a thing but might be a thing if I get a wild hair, so stay tuned). It’s just fat washing, which is a legit thing to do with any spirit. Fat suspended in a bottle of whiskey will impart its flavor into the spirit. Smart bartenders and mixologists have taken advantage of this for a while. Some brands do it too.
Flavor. Also mouthfeel. But mostly flavor. Do a peanut butter fat wash with a bottle of your favorite whiskey, and you now have a whiskey that tastes like peanut butter. It works because of the nutty notes in the complex flavor profile of whiskeys. They are distilled from grain, and a grain of wheat is not significantly different from a grain of arachis hypogaea (a peanut). All flavor composition rests on either the principle of sympathy (two things work well together) or antipathy (they fight in the bottle). Also, more than likely, somebody was drunk and poured their shot of bourbon into the Jiffy and a week later, they were like, oh, hey, I’d better drink this.
Like we know. First of all, how do we rank them? By flavor? Maybe. By availability? By peanutbutterbility?
Look, everyone’s flavor palette is unique and peanut butter sort of overwhelms the general profile of these whiskies anyway. They all taste like peanut butter. Some more than others. It’s impossible to come up with a list or a system that makes any sense of the peanut butter whiskey flavor phenomena. So we won’t. What we will do is list them all so you can find one that suits you. Please enjoy and remember to share this with your friends.