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Spending a few hundred dollars on a bottle of rye whiskey feels a tad absurd. Yet, it’s not out of the ordinary for rye lovers with cash to burn. Expensive and rare whiskeys have been around for ages. Today, you pay a hefty price for one-of-a-kind rarities that you may never see again. And that’s exactly what Chicken Cock Cotton Club Rye Whiskey Aged 20 Years is.

Chicken Cock — which, let’s face it, is a hilarious name for anything, let alone a whiskey — has dug deep into select stocks of a Canadian distillery and found a few barrels of 20-year-old rye whiskey to build a bespoke and very rare expression around. That’s pretty much Chicken Cock’s whole vibe. They have standard releases of both rye and bourbon in their throwback 1920s apothecary bottles and then a long list of very limited and rare releases of barrels that we will never see again.

The release I’m reviewing below dropped at the very end of last year and kind of flew under the radar. Part of that is that Chicken Cock is fairly new, even though it’s a revival brand. Another part is that Canadian whiskey hasn’t caught on in the U.S. quite as much as it should have… yet. For now, it’s mostly being built into American brands — Barrell, WhistlePig, Cotton Club — and not finding its own footing outside of those labels really. That’s a shame but, hey, at least we still get to drink the tipple from Canada even if it is under a U.S. company’s branding.

Okay, enough preamble, let’s jump into what’s in this bottle.

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Chicken Cock Cotton Club Rye Whiskey Aged 20 Years

ABV: 50%

Average Price: $616

The Whiskey:

The juice in this bottle is made with a 90 percent rye and ten percent malted barley mash bill, which is a standard you see with other big-name Canadian brands (cough, cough, Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye, cough, cough). In this case, that hot juice was left to mellow in ex-bourbon barrels for 20 long years somewhere in Canada (cough, cough, Manitoba, cough, cough). The barrels are then vatted and proofed down to 100 proof before bottling.

Tasting Notes:

Green and wet grass mingle with a stack of pine firewood on the nose as a pink bubble gum sweetness leads to a vanilla-heavy cream soda with a whiff of Orange Julius. The palate leans into the orange with a zesty vibe as a lemon meringue pie tartness and creaminess kicks in next to dried ginger, floral honey, and a sweet pine resin. The mid-palate really leans into the honey while adding in candied orange peels with a hint of allspice and anise leading toward a dry white pepper and old cinnamon sticks soaked in tart apple cider before a final rush of old cellar beams and dry black soil round out the end.

The Bottle:

Chicken Cock chose a throwback bottle design with a slightly lifted glass ridging in a large flask, reminiscent of an old medicine bottle. The bottle comes in a tin box, which is a nod to the old Cotton Club in Harlem in the 1920s where Chicken Cock whiskey was widely drunk savored out of tin cans (due to smuggling practices during Prohibition).

Then there’s the label which is pretty minimalist all things considered. The most important information is listed and there’s an old-school “cock” crowing away. That’s it. It’s simple but distinct.

Is It Worth The Price?

This is a very even-keeled sip of whiskey. It’s deeply layered, takes you on a journey (from bright sweetness and fresh grass to moldy cellars), and has a good balance of sweet, sharp, and lush.

But $500 to $600 (depending on where you find the bottle) is a big ask. I’m going to drink mine on special occasions because I had to open it. Otherwise, this might be more of an investment bottle than a sipping one.

That said, this is worth tasting at a high-end whiskey bar or tasting if you do come across it. It’s a totally different rye than the standard 95/5 American ryes that have dominated the conversation over the last decade with their “spicy” nature. This feels subtler than those and leaves you with a bit of a warming yet familiar feeling of comfort. It’s a nice feeling.

PlayStation unveiled a number of interesting games at its most recent State of Play. Not among those games has been a long-rumored remake of The Last of Us. Considering The Last of Us is one of PlayStation’s biggest IPs, we’d expect that to be the kind of game that begins or ends a showcase like State of Play.

Whatever plans they had to unveil the remake were spoiled by PlayStation when the PlayStation Direct website leaked the trailer for the game. The trailer showcases a gorgeous looking world on PlayStation 5 hardware, a release date, and tells players that a PC port is also in development. All of this would have been really exciting during a State of Play like event, but that doesn’t make any of this less cool to know about.

Is it funny that PlayStation accidentally leaked its own announcement? Yes. Does that make the announcement of a remake for The Last of Us any less exciting? Absolutely not. It was one of the best games on PlayStation 3, had a really awesome HD remake on the PlayStation 5, and the opportunity to play it on current generation hardware is intriguing. Personally, I’m excited to see how they can make an already beautiful looking game look even better. A few comparison screenshots have been making the rounds on Twitter and it reminds us how great the first game looked.

We’ll get a chance to experience the entire remake once it releases in September.

They Might Be Giants had just began the long-awaited 30th anniversary tour of their classic album Flood last night at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom. The Brooklyn geek rock band already had to postpone most of the tour that had began in early 2020, but, well… you know this pandemic story by now. At any rate, following last night’s show, lead singer/guitarist John Flansbaugh was involved in a “serious” car accident on his way home and the band is postponing their shows through June and more.

“The initial report is that he has seven broken ribs, several of which have multiple fractures,” read a statement from John Linnell, who co-founded the band with Flansbaugh, sings and plays accordion in TMBG. “The good news is that no vital organs were involved and the long-time prognosis is positive. Of course, there will be a lengthy recovery process.”

It’s a tragic roadblock for They Might be Giants, who were looking forward to finally touring the country playing their breakthrough 1990 album. But it’s going to have to wait a while once again as Flansbaugh recovers.

“Sadly, we are going to have to postpone the rest of June dates once more,” Linnell’s statement continued. “For now, we are hopeful that the late summer dates beginning August 30th will be able to continue as planned.”

LeBron James is still playing basketball at a remarkably high level for someone who is 37 years old. While the Los Angeles Lakers missed the playoffs this past season, James averaged 30.3 points, 8.2 rebounds, and 6.2 assists per game, and when he hasn’t dealt with injuries or illness in recent years has still looked like one of the best players in the world.

Still, Father Time is undefeated and James is getting closer and closer to losing that battle. He doesn’t have to start thinking about what he’ll do after his NBA career — in large part because he is already involved in numerous off-court things that should make his transition into his post-playing days more natural — but on an upcoming episode of The Shop, James once again went into a particular thing he wants to pursue: owning an NBA team.

“I wanna own a team,” James said. “Yeah, I wanna buy a team for sure.”

This isn’t a big surprise, because James is already involved in sports ownership through his stake in Fenway Sports Group and has said a few times in the past that this is one of his goals. But this clip is unique because James brought up the city where he wants to become an owner.

“I want a team in Vegas,” James said. “I want the team in Vegas.”

Las Vegas — which the league heads to every year for its Summer League — has been mentioned as a potential landing spot for an NBA team in the past, and in recent years, teams in the NHL, NFL, and WNBA have started to call the city home.

Soccer Mommy’s singles from her forthcoming album Sometimes, Forever have been spectral. “Shotgun” was brooding with a catchy melody; “Unholy Affliction” was similarly detached but even more experimental; “Bones” felt like a return to her vulnerable, sparse sound from Clean.

“Newdemo,” the newest single, is out today. Like “Bones,” it sticks to the basics for the most part, with Sophie Allison playing an acoustic guitar and singing softly and earnestly, her words resembling poetry: “Sometimes I dream there’s a gate to a garden / That only the earth could break through / But what is a dream but a light in the darkness / A lie that you wish would come true.”

There’s some distortion and synths that lift the song into a different dimension, imbuing it with an ethereal atmosphere. It’s not necessarily dark or eerie like “Shotgun” or “Unholy Affliction”; it’s just supernatural.

“I didn’t want to make something super depressing without any sense of magic,” Allison said in a statement. “We played around with the space to make the song feel vast, so ‘Newdemo’ had a huge transformation in the studio. It’s one of my favorites off of the record.”

Listen to “Newdemo” above.

Sometimes, Forever is out 6/24 via Loma Vista. Pre-save it here.

When Harry Styles isn’t creating music for a sushi restaurant, he is starring in not just one, but two movies about living in the 1950s. It only makes sense after making his acting debut in a 1940s war movie.

My Policeman, the upcoming film based on the 2012 novel of the same name, stars Styles alongside The Crown‘s Emma Corrin and David Dawson in a heated love triangle set in the U.K. in the 1950s. Styles portrays Tom, a gay police officer who hides his sexuality by dating a schoolteacher, played by the charming Corrin. The trio gets caught in a love triangle between Tom, his wife, and his real lover, Patrick.

My Policeman will get a theatrical release on October 21st before heading to Amazon Prime on November 4th. But, Harry fans rejoice! Because the first look of the film dropped today, featuring everyone’s favorite homemaker soaking in the sun.

The film jumps between 1957 and the 1990s, with Tom’s older self played by Homeland’s Linus Roache alongside Gina McKee and Rupert Everett. While Styles wasn’t exactly on the short list of actors for the project, the singer actually sought out the movie himself after reading the script. Director Michael Grandage told Vanity Fair that he was impressed the very first time he met Styles.

“He knew every single beat of it at that meeting. I found that incredibly impressive,” Grandage said. “He knew other people’s lines; he knew all of his lines. He knew why he wanted to talk about it, why one scene worked this way and another worked.” Grandage added that Tom is a complex character, and Styles was willing to focus on the character’s development.

“The whole point of Tom is that he is a character who is confused,” Grandage explained. “It’s made more problematic by the fact that he’s a policeman, and he’s in a career that is about upholding the law. And the law in the country at the time is about everything he feels—the complexity of it is something that whoever was going to play younger Tom and older Tom needed to somehow understand and absorb,” the director added. We all know that Styles is good at singing about feelings, so it will be interesting to see him playing those out when the movie drops this fall.

(Via Vanity Fair)

Summer is officially here and we hope you haven’t made too many plans yet. Why? Because after you hear about all of the music festivals, blockbuster movies, streaming TV shows, and Pride celebrations, you’re going to want to update that social calendar.

Culture Quick Bites host Irene Walton is here to break down the biggest headliners, series, parades, and vacation destinations that should be on your radar this season. So yes, that means we’re still hyped over the latest installment of Stranger Things and the newest drop from Amazon Prime Video’s superhero drama, The Boys. We’re also looking forward to a slate of Summer movies set to rock the box office, one that includes the final entry in the Jurassic World trilogy, a Buzz Lightyear flick, and that wild Elvis biopic from Baz Luhrmann.

But, if your goal is to enjoy the warmer weather this summer by spending some more time outdoors we’ve got something for that too. From music festival headlined by artists like Halsey, Justin Bieber, and Kid Cudi to Pride celebrations happening in Vegas and the return of Summer travel, there’s a lot to be excited for this month.

Check out the full video above for more.

When Johnny Depp joined Jeff Beck on stage before the Heard trial verdict was even handed down, they mentioned that they made an album together. “I met this guy five years ago and we’ve never stopped laughing since,” Beck told the crowd. “We actually made an album. I don’t know how it happened. It will be out in July.”

That LP has now been officially announced. It’s titled 18 and will be released this summer. It was recorded over the past three years, and it contains 13 tracks, most of which are covers. The first single “This Is a Song for Miss Hedy Lamarr” is out today, and it’s an original, written by Depp. “I was blown away by it,” Beck said of the track. “That song is one of the reasons I asked him to make an album with me.” The album also features their 2020 collaborative cover of John Lennon’s “Isolation.”

“When Johnny and I started playing together, it really ignited our youthful spirit and creativity,” Beck said in a statement. “We would joke about how we felt 18 again, so that just became the album title too.”

Depp added, “It’s an extraordinary honor to play and write music with Jeff, one of the true greats and someone I am now privileged enough to call my brother.”

Listen to “This Is a Song for Miss Hedy Lamarr” above.

18 arrives 7/15.

Earlier this month, 070 Shake dropped her much-anticipated album, You Can’t Kill Me. She recorded a portion of the album in Arizona over the course of six months, which she felt was a nice break from LA. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Shake detailed the process of making the album and distancing herself from social media.

When making this record, Shake kept the music in mind, as opposed to the sales and streaming numbers.

“I’m fine living how I live,” she said, “being minimal, not living above my means… I come from a place where I didn’t even know that Hollywood was a real place. I’m very grateful, and I don’t need too much. I want exactly what I need. With that, I’ma always be good. I’ll never fail.”

Additionally, Shake shared a story from tour that further reinforced her minimalistic principles.

“I just went to Brazil [for the South American leg of the tour] and gave a kid $100 and he threw everything he was selling that day, hugged his dad, and they jumped around,” Shake said. “We were watching them, literally crying, like, ‘Bro, why the f*ck do I need a billion dollars?’ That shit is crazy. I would never want a billion dollars to myself. Never. If I got a billion dollars, I’m not doing enough. I’m not giving enough in my life.”

You Can’t Kill Me is out now via Def Jam. Stream it here.

Jay-Z, who became hip-hop’s first legit billionaire after making a decade’s worth of shrewd business decisions, has long advocated for financial literacy as a pathway out of the impoverished situations he grew up in. This week, he went a step further, offering a financial literacy program for residents of the Marcy Houses, the public housing complex where he grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The Bitcoin Academy, which Jay launched in partnership with frequent business partner Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO and the founder of Block, which includes Square, will offer classes to Marcy Residents both online and in person.

Those classes will not only include lessons like “What is Money?,” “What Is Cryptocurrency?,” “What is Blockchain?” and “How to Keep Yourself Safe from Scammers,” but they will also have dinners served at each class, with attendees receiving smartphones with data plans to help with the lessons. In a statement, Jay’s mom, Gloria Carter, said:

“The Shawn Carter Foundation has always been about providing educational access and opening doors of opportunity to underserved communities. No one should be left out or behind. We truly appreciate the partnership with Block and Jack Dorsey to bring financial, specifically bitcoin education to the Marcy residents, where I spent many years raising my family. Everyone should be empowered to make informed financial decisions in order to take care of themselves and their families”