August 6: Drammers Boston, featuring James Saunders of New England Barrel Co....

Fellow Drammers!

Our first in-person Drammers Boston event will be Friday, August 6th at 7pm, and a huge thank you to Tash Ross for hosting! The address is (63 Goodnow Road, Sudbury, MA, 01776). Going forward, we're hoping to host the events in various locations in and around Boston. And note we say first "in person" event because of course we did do an online event with Kavalan last year just for our Boston friends. In any case, we've got a great lineup for the event, including a guest speaker! We're delighted to welcome James Saunders, the man behind New England Barrel Co., a fairly recent entrant to the curated/sourced whiskey scene which is starting to turn some heads. He'll introduce 3 of the whiskies we'll be drinking, and we've got 4 other whiskies plus a mezcal that we'll be tasting as well, all exclusive Drammers picks. Drumroll please:

• New England Company Bourbon, Batches 1, 2 and 3: If you're new to this brand, you're in luck -- we're going to be tasting all of their bourbon releases from the beginning, so that means batches 1, 2 and 3. We have Steve Anthony, (co-head of the Boston chapter along with Tash), to thank for batches 1 and 2, which he is providing from his personal collection.

• 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 Boston in a month or so, this will definitely be sold out, so we wanted to make sure our Boston 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! Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

Cheers,
Drammers Club

• $40/person for Drammers Members

• $50/person for Drammers Observers / Non-Members