By Richard Thomas Rating: B Located in the Appalachian foothills of Virginia, not all that far from Charlottesville, Virginia Distillery made its initial reputation for skillfully created hybrid whiskies: they blended their youthful in-house American single malts with imported Scottish malts, and then gave the hybrid a “marriage” (secondary finishing) in used-but-native Virginia casks. An …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ It is such a fixture of Craft Whiskey 2.0 that I get tired of saying it, only to find that saying it is necessary: whiskey made by small distillers is now properly mature more often than not. Many of the bottles coming out of Pittsburgh’s Wigle Distillery are a perfect …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ Seeing as how I was down in the Brooklyn Navy Yard just a few days ago, enjoyed a warm cocktail on a frigid, pre-Snowpocalypse 2022 day, it seems like as good a time as any to address Kings County Distillery’s Empire Rye. It’s a good example of one of the …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ This most recent release from the skilled folks at Barrell Craft Spirits is drawn from 6, 7, 10, 15 and 16 year old barrels sourced from the (now familiar) states of Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee. The company says the 6, 7 and 10 year old bourbons were of two groups, …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ One of the best aspects of Lost Lantern’s model is also what makes it unique: it’s a true negociant in the European sense, but plying its business in the United States. There are two things to understand about that statement to get at why it makes them unique. First, as …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B One of the best outcomes of American whiskey becoming a truly national industry, with distilleries producing coast to coast for the first time in our history, is the creation of so many regional styles and appellations. One such is Empire Rye, a New York State appellation created by a growing …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ The latest batch of single cask bottlings from Lost Lantern includes some real lovelies, and among them is the bourbon from Boulder Distillery. That Colorado distillery was started by Scotsman Alastair Brogan, who brought Scotch-style whiskey-making to the Rocky Mountains, complete with a Forsyths-made copper pot still. That Scottish style …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ Cask finishes figure highly in the annual limited edition game, but enthusiasts usually think only of the major and mid-sized distilleries. However, craft distillers do regular, annual releases too, and some of them are merit more attention than they get. A fine example of that is Laws Whiskey House Cognac-Finished …
By Randall H. Borkus Rating: B Alberta Premium Cask Strength Rye is a Canadian rye whisky made with 100% Canadian rye and spring water from the Canadian Rocky Mountains by Alberta Distillers Limited in Calgary, Alberta. There is not much detail on their website, but my online research asserts the whiskey is aged for at …
By Richard Thomas Rating: B Grain & Barrel Spirits, the company behind the revival of the Chicken Cock brand, and some of the sourced releases under that title have been quite excellent. In particular, I was quite fond of the Chicken Cock 15 Year Old Bourbon. The news that the company was bringing out a …
