Brown sugar | Vanilla | Aged oak | Fresh dough | Light caramel | Honey | Slightly earthy | Dab of ethanol

Caramel candy | Brown sugar crumble | Sweet vanilla | Light rye spice | New oak | Concentration of sweet notes

Rye spice | Dry aged oak | Leather | Light tobacco leaf | Cinnamon stick | Faint mixed nuts |  Lingering spice

After a 2 year break, the Jim Beam Distillery has brought back the Hardin’s Creek series with a trio of new releases. A follow-up to the 2023 Hardin’s Creek Kentucky Series, which focused on the three literal places of Hardin’s Creek: specifically, the aging campuses that Beam uses, the Warehouse series narrows the focus to the actual warehouse types that the company uses to age bourbon. The Warehouse Series also employs a new type of packaging, one that Master Distiller Freddie Noe wanted people to take away less of what they initially saw, instead making consumers more curious about the elements that go into the whiskey.

The Warehouse Series is comprised of three bottles, showcasing warehouse R, warehouse W, and warehouse G, each with its own theme. While the proof and age stay the same, Noe stated to us that all whiskeys were aged within 1 month of each other; the changing variable is the number of floors in each warehouse. For warehouse R, “The Mushroom,” the company focuses on a single-story warehouse that employs an escalator design, featuring just one floor that houses barrels 20-24 feet high. Noe states that in order to use the escalator machine to pull barrels out of the warehouse, the warehouse's massive doors must be open, which means a lot of air is flowing during this time before the doors are shut and the warehouse is sealed back up.

Each of the bottles in the series contains a specific nickname and image. For warehouse R “The Mushroom,” the company chose this image and name because the warehouse has no windows, which is “cool and dark like the forest floor inhabited by mushrooms.” Additionally, the bottles all contain a series of graphics that convey different meanings for the bourbon. The number in the top left corner represents the actual release in the series (in this case, 1), the leaf in the lower right stands for the season, the warehouse with a C in it on the upper left stands for Clermont, the powerbar represents ABV, while the hourglass stands for age. It’s a fun nod to fans of Easter eggs who will enjoy the subtle way the brand conveys this information.

For those who might not know the background of the series and see a bottle with a mushroom on it, they might expect a funky-tasting bourbon; however, the first release in the new Hardin’s Creek Warehouse Series is anything but. The bourbon instead focuses on sweet, classic notes from start to finish. Along the way, a slight deviation pops in, including a fresh dough scent or its ever-so-slight earthy aroma, but for the most part, it’s more classic tasting through and through.

Compared to the other two releases in the Warehouse series, Warehouse “R” The Mushroom seems to come in just slightly under the other two pours. That’s also part of the problem with the Warehouse Series. Unless Beam decides to release a set of 200mL bottles of all three releases like they eventually did with the Kentucky Series, the majority of consumers most likely won’t have the opportunity to compare all three against each other. In the end, this bourbon offers an inoffensive sip that most will be hard to find fault with; however, as a standalone bourbon, it also doesn’t readily stand out.