Apr. 23: Drammers Portland...
Hello Portland Drammers!
We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at our next Drammers Portland tasting of rare whiskey, mezcal and other spirits, which is coming up on April 23rd — since it’s a Sunday, we’re starting the event earlier in the day at 1pm (this will free us up to go to Dante’s Sinferno in the evening, but I digress, ha). So, first things first — John and Maryam have kindly agreed to host again (address: 2505 SW Hillcrest Drive, 97201). We have a kickass lineup teed up for you:
Riz - Louisiana Rice Whiskey. A couple weeks ago we were in New Orleans for the New Orleans Bourbon Festival, and we stopped in at our favorite craft distillery there: Atelier Vie. Their founder/distiller Jedd is a bit of a mad genius, and plays around with everything from growing his own wormwood to make absinthe, to making hopped whiskies, but he’s really made a name for himself with this one — RIZ, a Louisiana rice whiskey. One of the most interesting things we’ve learned about Atelier Vie is how they play around with barrel sizes, moving fluidly from 53 gallon barrels to 10, 15 and 30 gallon barrels and back again, depending on how it’s aging. We’ve never really heard of anyone else doing this — he’s constantly checking in on the barrels and if he tastes something that he thinks he needs to slow down, speed up or otherwise mix up the maturation, he just does it, resulting in barrels that have a unique topsy turvy barrel history (after all, he makes gin, absinthe, rum, single malt — he has a lot of finishing barrel options to play with). He has a couple variations on this, and the one we’ll be trying is aged 3 years and bottled at 45% abv.
Loch Lomond's Glengarry 12yo. Our newest Drammers pick single barrel just arrived, a 12yo single malt Scotch from the Highlands distillery Loch Lomond. Distilled in 2010, bottled in 2023, unpeated, matured in a 1st fill Bordeaux red wine barrel -- the barrel yielded 281 bottles. This was a big hit last week at our tastings in Kansas City and St. Louis. 55.0% abv. Of course non-chill filtered and no color added. Cask #21/546-6. Exclusively available to Drammers members.
Version Francaise - Hepp 2014. Have you heard of the Hepp distillery? Neither had we until our friends at La Maison du Whisky started releasing their Version Francaise line of new French whiskies, many from distilleries we'd never heard of before. This bottling of 2014 single malt French whisky (aged 5 years) was only released at the LMDW shops in Paris, where we were fortunate enough to pick one up (1 of only 359 bottles total). 45% abv, made in the Alsace region. We recently hosted an online discussion with the LMDW team about their recent very limited number of their first releases here in the United States, which you can see here if you'd like to learn more about them.
Starlight Single Barrel Bourbon Finished in Grape Brandy Casks. On Friday, April 7th, our Indianapolis chapter visited the Starlight distillery in Southern Indiana to select a barrel of whiskey for the club, and one of the ones we picked was a special white grape brandy finished bourbon. It won’t be ready until November, so we have a while to wait, but our friends at the great liquor shop Rural Inn picked a similar barrel that we’ll try at this tasting. It’s Starlight’s single barrel bourbon finished in a grape brandy barrel, barrel no 22-2069-1, aged 4.5 years and bottled at 55% abv.
Switchgrass Spirits Straight Rye Whiskey. We visited this distillery at a recent meeting of our St. Louis chapter, a fairly new distillery that is making some interesting products all in house. Their “Switchgrass Rye” stood out as one of their most impressive spirits, with a mashbill of 76% rye, 12% wheat and 12% barley. Now don’t get us wrong, it’s a young whiskey, aged “no less than 2 years”, so we’ll need to keep that in mind as we sip it. But so far definitely call us intrigued. Sweet mashed btw. 50% abv.
Copper & Kings Brandy - Finished in a Tequila Cask. This barrel pick recently arrived from the Copper & Kings distillery in Louisville, Kentucky. They specialize in American brandy and here we've got a single barrel of their grape brandy aged in a tequila cask, bottled at cask strength of 62.5% abv. It’ll be fun to compare this to the grape brandy finished bourbon from Starlight! It is available exclusively to members of our club.
Rezpiral - Simeon Ramirez Mezcal Ensamble of Mexicano Agaves. We had the pleasure of selecting a batch a few years ago that Simeon did with his father Apolonio, that time from a tobasiche agave, which was dominated by vegetal and mineral notes. That pick was a big hit, so we selected a new batch that just arrived -- a mix of 4 varietals of the Mexicano agave, it has a dominant lemon-lime custardy-sorbet flavor, backfilled with vanilla. Yum. Details here, and available exclusively to members of Drammers for $120/bottle, 50.8% abv.
Rezpiral - Tobasiche Mezcal by Simeon and Apolonio Ramirez. We picked this batch of mezcal from Simeon three years ago, a batch of the tobasiche agave that Simeon made with his father Apolonio (our newest batch is made by Simeon by himeself). This earlier batch is very nearly sold out, which is both why we selected a new batch from him, and we our bringing out some of our last bottles of our earlier batch for one last hurrah. 50.9% abv, yummy stuff. Exclusively available to Drammers Members.
That’s our lineup, we hope you can join us! As always we’ll order in some light food to try to make sure that nobody’s drinking on an empty stomach, and everyone who has been to one of our events is welcome to invite friends to join. Of course, it is strongly encouraged that everyone arrange a ride home from the event.
Cheers!
Charlie, John, Chris and Drammers Club