Aug. 12: Drammers Austin!...

Fellow Drammers!

Our next Drammers Austin event will be on Thursday, August 12th, starting at 7pm, and a big thank you to Stephen Boske for hosting us downtown (110 San Antonio Street, 8th Floor). We’ve got a fantastic lineup of whiskies that we’ll be drinking

• Starward Australian Single Malt - Drammers Barrel Pick.  We’re big fans of the burgeoning world whisky scene, almost all of which is made in the Scotch style.  Starward has consciously sought to go the other direction, expressly saying things like they’re “trying to do everything they can to not be Scotch”, ha.  Early on, they decided to make maturation in big Ozzie red wine barrels their signature, and our club’s barrel pick certainly shows that front and center, as does the fast maturation inherent in Melbourne’s climate.  Very few Starward single barrels have been released into the wild to date, making this a rare chance to try their whisky at cask strength!

• Wyoming Whiskey – 2 Drammers Barrel Picks.  Next up, let’s taste some bourbon!  This distillery made big waves, when they launched back in 2009, convincing the master distiller for Makers Mark to come out of retirement to be their master distiller for a while and show them the ropes, eventually passing the baton to their own home-grown team.  We’re big fans of their juice, and we were curious what happened when they finally made the transition – so we flew out to Wyoming for a big online Drammers event, tasted a ton of barrels, and picked one of each from just before and after the master distiller transition.  We’ll taste both on Saturday, and you’ll have to decide for yourself if you can taste a difference, and if so which you prefer!  Bottled at cask strength as always.

• Peerless Rye - 3 Expressions. Next up, we'll be tasting 3 barrels our club bought from the great Peerless rye in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. The company has an incredible history dating back to the late 1880s. The company was dormant for a while until Corky Taylor and his son Carson resurrected it in 2015 (they are descendants of the original owners). They make bourbon and rye, but have really made a name for themselves on the rye side in particular, unusually using a sweet mash process (rather than the usual sour mash) and a notably low barrel entry proof. We're big fans of this distillery and bought 3 barrels during an online event we did with them last year. The first is an exquisite example of their rye, the second is a double-barreled version of their rye (they don't do that normally, but in this case the original barrel had issues so they had no choice but to rebarrel it) and finally a very rare experiment from them -- the single barrel rye finished in an absinthe cask from their friends at Copper & Kings distillery down the road! All bottled at cask strength, as usual.

• Balcones True Blue Corn Whiskey Matured in a Tequila Cask. Of the 43 barrels we bought last year, this is possibly our most celebrated. By the time we come back to Austin in a month or so, this will definitely be sold out, so we wanted to make sure our Austin members had a chance to try it before its gone. This takes Balcones fantastic blue corn whiskey, and as an experiment they matured it in an ex-tequila cask, which is unimaginably good. The reaction to this barrel was so great, that they decided to make a product extension to their core range, which will hopefully be coming out soon. Here's a chance to taste the barrel that started it all, at cask strength of 56.6% abv.

• Rezpiral - Capon Espadin. Our very first bottling, Drammers #001! This bottle is nearly sold out, with about 13 remaining as of this writing, so we wanted to give our Las Vegas members one last chance to taste it. This was produced by maestro mezcalero Aureliano Hernandez, and it was such a hit that we went back to him to get another exclusive batch for Drammers, his Tobala con Frutas. This first selection resulted from a visit by Rezpiral founder Alex White -- we tried 10 expressions, and this was the one the members loved the most. Two key things to know about this mezcal - it was rested in glass (oxidized, essentially) for over 9 months, much longer than the public releases by Aureliano, and that makes a BIG difference. Second, it is a "capon" espadin, which means "castrated" -- just as the agave shoots up the giant stalk to reproduce (at which point the plant dies), the mezcalero cuts the stalk -- the plant still thinks it needs to generate sugar for the reproduction process, resulting in a hyper-sweet agave, and ultimately a sweeter mezcal.

That’s our lineup, we hope you can join us! We’ll order in pizza (included with the event) to make sure nobody’s drinking on an empty stomach.

Cheers!
Drammers Club