Nooku Peppermint Bourbon Cream

Colorado’s Old Elk Distillery is the home of a unique bourbon cream called Nooku, made using the company’s own two year old craft bourbon. We reviewed the original in 2017, now we’re back to look at the brand’s seasonally-appropriate extension of the line, which adds peppermint to the mix.

As any drinker knows, adding mint to a beverage will quickly overpower other elements, and that’s definitely the case here. The nose is a combination of vanilla and peppermint in roughly equal proportions, though there’s a clearly milky character underneath it that adds a creamy component.

As expected, the palate showcases peppermint heavily, a dominant quality amidst the creamy, though not overly heavy, body. This overpowers most of the underlying, whiskey-driven vanilla character — as well as the cinnamon and chocolate notes that make standard Nooku so charming — leaving things fairly one-note in the end. While it’s still reasonably charming — who doesn’t like mint? — the finish is where things start to crumble. Here, Nooku Peppermint becomes quite saccharine and cloying, to the point where I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to scrape the creamy residue off the roof of my mouth.

34 proof.