Pairing Wood Hat Spirits Who-8 with The Rich And The Good

The Whiskey: Wood Hat Spirits WHO-8

The whiskey this month comes from Wood Hat Spirits, a craft distillery in New Florence, Missouri. I was able to sit down with the CEO Gary Hinegardner and discuss Wood Hat and the spirit industry, which you can read here. In the meantime, I picked my favorite offering of theirs for this month’s pairing – WHO-8 straight bourbon. WHO-8 is a traditional bourbon in every way, except for one thing – the corn strain. WHO-8 is made from Orange #8, a corn strain bred by Wood Hat specifically for bourbon.

On the nose, I find the rich notes of caramel and butterscotch right off the bat. The butterscotch surfaces above the caramel and is really pleasant. Underneath those initial sweet notes I find coffee with creamer, creating this beautiful sweet/non-sweet combination. Cinnamon (and cinnamon rolls,) cherries, baked goods are all there as well and combine into a really intriguing medley.

On the palate, this pour turns dark – in a good way. Dark chocolate is my initial impression, followed closely by a nutty note almost like salted peanuts, a note that makes me think of Knob Creek. Chocolate cake and salted chocolate also rise to the top, creating the impression of tasting something like a chocolate covered pretzel.

On the finish, the peanut note returns. That sweet and salty dichotomy continues, though a little diminished. The finish isn’t quite as long as I’d like it to be, though it still carries for a bit and certainly isn’t weak. 

The Game: The Rich And The Good

The Rich And The Good is one of the very few stock trading games in my collection. There are dozens if not hundreds of stock market games out there, but if I had to pick only one, The Rich And The Good would be the one I would pick. The premise is simple: each player is a trader in 1800’s England purchasing and selling shares in different types of goods – coffee, tea, and rubber, for example. As a trader, you have some levers to pull to influence the market in a way that suits you, but the other traders do as well – and that’s where the twist comes in. Each players shares two “hands” of cards with another player that will allow either player to pick a good and increase or decrease its value. Only you and the other player know what’s in a certain hand, but there are other hand you don’t know about. So, you might buy a lot of a certain good seeing that you have a ton of positive cards for that good in front of you, not knowing that the players you’re sharing hands with are seeing other hands with lots of negative cards for that good. 

This dynamic of shared but limited information leads to a fascinating game of signal-reading – you may see other players around the table buy up a lot of a certain good, so that means it’s a good buy… but you have several negative cards for that good, which means the price will tank soon… but if the other players notice you not buying that good after their signal of buy, they may pick up on your cards… and so on. Really interesting stuff.

The other twist in this game is where the second part of the title comes in. To win, you must be both the rich AND the good. The winner is the trader with the most money at the end of the game, but the trader who gave the least to charity is automatically eliminated. Every round, every player has the opportunity to give to charity from their wealth. Doing so decreases your cash for purchasing stock, but if you don’t, you run the risk of being seen as the least generous and automatically losing the game. You also can’t see how much others have given throughout the game, so there’s some fascinating games of chicken with how much each player gives. You can’t give too little, but also giving too much can mean not having enough wealth to win!