Stephen Curry's bourbon is in Hong Kong, and it is a better bottle than the words "celebrity bourbon" will lead you to expect. Gentleman's Cut Kentucky Straight Bourbon is in Hong Kong now at HKD 880, alongside all four of the rare Player Exclusive bottlings. Here is what is in the bottle, how it tastes, and how to drink it.
What Gentleman's Cut actually is
Gentleman's Cut is a Kentucky straight bourbon founded by Stephen Curry with John Schwartz, the man behind the Amuse Bouche winery in Napa. It is made at Game Changer Distillery, part of Boone County Distilling Co. in Kentucky — a name that goes back to a Boone County distillery founded in 1833, with the modern distillery re-established in 2015.
It bottles at 90 proof, 45% ABV, after five to seven years in new charred white oak. The mash bill is 75% corn, 21% rye and 4% malted barley.
Those are the numbers. The thing that makes it worth your attention is how it was distilled.
The 500-gallon still, and why it changes the whiskey
Almost all bourbon is made in column stills — tall continuous columns that run around the clock, mash in one end, spirit out the other, never stopping. They are brilliant machines, and they are the reason so much excellent bourbon is available at a fair price. Most of the bourbon you have loved was made this way.
Gentleman's Cut is made in a single 500-gallon copper still that the distillery calls "The Bear", filled and emptied one run at a time.
At that scale, distillation strips out fewer of the heavy compounds, so more of them survive into the finished spirit. Those compounds are the ones you feel rather than taste. They make the whiskey thicker on the tongue, and they make the flavour hang on noticeably longer after you swallow than 90 proof normally manages.
If you drink single malt, this is an argument you already accept. It is simply rare to be able to make it about bourbon, and rarer still at this price.
Every number in the mash bill earns its keep
75% corn is what makes it bourbon, and what gives it the sweet, rounded core people come to the category for.
21% rye is the number worth noticing. It is higher than most high-corn bourbons and it is doing real work — a dry, peppery lift that stops the corn turning the whole thing into a sugar bomb.
The 4% malted barley is the engine. It provides the enzymes that convert the starch, and it leaves a faint biscuit note underneath everything else.
Five to seven years in new charred oak is enough time to take on real colour, vanilla and caramel from the wood without the oak starting to dominate the spirit.
How Gentleman's Cut tastes
The nose is honey and fresh vanilla bean, with something faintly earthy sitting underneath it. The palate leads with caramel, then cinnamon, then the peppery edge the rye promised. What gives it away is the feel — thicker on the tongue than 45% has any right to be, which is the batch distillation showing up in the glass.
The finish is where it earns the price. Cocoa, toast and toasted chestnut arrive first, and underneath them sits honey, a floral lift and a note of dark fruit that keeps going long after you have swallowed. Most bourbons at this price are gone from your mouth within seconds. This one lingers.
Give it air before you judge it. Twenty minutes in the glass and it is a noticeably softer, sweeter whiskey than the one you first poured — the honey and the dark fruit come forward as it opens. The same is true of the bottle: it is better a week after opening than it is on the night you pull the cork.
At 45% it does not need water, and we would not add any until you have given it time instead. If the first sip feels tight, wait rather than reaching for the jug.
A bottle for the Hong Kong table
Hong Kong has spent twenty years learning to drink Scotch and Japanese whisky beautifully. Bourbon arrived later and mostly ended up at the bottom of the back bar, poured into an Old Fashioned and forgotten. That is changing, and the reason is the food.
A bourbon with this much sweetness and this much spice sits down at a Cantonese table as though it were invited. Roast goose, with all that rendered fat and crackling skin, meets the caramel head-on. Char siu and its lacquered, honeyed edge picks up the vanilla.
Sichuan heat is cooled by the corn and then lifted again by the rye. A dry-aged steak off a hot grill and a bourbon aged in charred oak are, in flavour terms, the same idea twice.
This is the part nobody else in the category is talking about. Whisky lists in this city are built around Islay and Yamazaki; almost nobody has thought about what an American whiskey does next to the food Hong Kong actually eats every week.
So pour it at the table rather than after it. Open it at a dinner with eight people around it and a goose in the middle. That is the room this bottle was made for, and it is a far better argument for bourbon than anything written on a shelf talker. Bourbon is quietly becoming Hong Kong's next spirits category, and this is a good moment to be early to it.
How to drink it
Neat is the honest way to meet it. Over one large cube, the chill tightens the caramel and pushes the chestnut forward — use one big cube rather than several small ones, because surface area is what dilutes.
It makes an exceptional Old Fashioned. Sixty millilitres of Gentleman's Cut, a barspoon of demerara syrup, two dashes of Angostura, stirred thirty seconds over one large cube, with an orange peel expressed over the top and dropped in.
No muddled fruit, no cherry unless you want one. At 90 proof it holds its shape against the dilution instead of disappearing into it, and the rye keeps it from going syrupy.
At the table it belongs with roast meats, anything off a hot grill, and dark chocolate at the end of the night.
The four Player Exclusives
Alongside the standard bottling, Gentleman's Cut releases a small series of Player Exclusives at cask-strength proofs, in runs measured in hundreds rather than thousands. All four are in Hong Kong.
The Player Exclusive Shacho at HKD 2,400 is an eleven-year Kentucky straight bourbon finished in Japanese oak. Shacho is the Japanese word for the person who leads, and the bottle was built around that idea. It is the natural next step for anyone who has finished the standard bottle and wants to see where the range goes.
The Player Exclusive IV Straight Rye at HKD 3,000 marks Curry's four-thousandth three-pointer and was aged four thousand days to match. One thousand bottles were made. Vinous awarded it 93 points.
The Player Exclusive José Andrés 10 Year, also HKD 3,000 and also 93 points from Vinous, is finished in Pedro Ximénez sherry casks and made with the chef in his own honour of Spain. Eight hundred bottles were released, and the majority of the proceeds go to World Central Kitchen.
At the top sits the Player Exclusive 16 Year at HKD 8,000, the Father and Son edition marking Curry's sixteenth NBA season. It went into barrel in August 2008 and came out sixteen years later at 100 proof: dried cherry and caramel over tobacco leaf. One thousand bottles worldwide, and 95 points from Vinous — the highest score the brand has been given.
Runs of eight hundred and a thousand bottles rarely reach Hong Kong at all. When these are gone there is no second shipment to wait for, and the whole bourbon range is here now.
This shipment came in a temperature-controlled container
We booked a temperature-controlled container, and when it turned out to be shipping in a plain steel box we cancelled the whole thing and recalled it. It arrived six months late and went straight into temperature-controlled storage. Every bottle we hold was under temperature control from Kentucky to Hong Kong, with no gap — which is routine for fine wine and close to unheard of in spirits. Read the whole story here →
Where to buy Gentleman's Cut in Hong Kong
The whole range is here. It is worth seeing as one story rather than five separate bottles:
Gentleman's Cut is stocked and poured at selected shops, bars, clubs and restaurants across Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. If you would rather buy it near you, or find somewhere pouring it tonight, the full list of Gentleman's Cut outlets in Hong Kong is kept up to date, and trade enquiries can be made from the same page.
Please drink responsibly. Sale of alcohol to persons under 18 is prohibited.
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