Jan. 17: Drammers Stamford with Maguey Melate's Dave Lather......
Hello Stamford Drammers!
Happy new year! We're very excited to announce our next Drammers Stamford meeting! A big thank you to Zac Ross for hosting us at his brewery, which is actually right over the border in Nyack at Marlowe Artisanal Ales (132 Main Street, Nyack, 10960) - Zac will be on hand if folks want to try some of his beers and ask questions etc.
The event will feature a mix of bourbon, rye and peated single malt (the latter 2 coming from Denmark!), but the central focus of the event will be mezcal, and we're delighted to welcome as our guest speaker the mezcal expert, and our dear friend and fellow Drammer, Dave Lather, who is one of the principals of a wonderful mezcal brand called Maguey Melate that our club has done 2 bottlings with.
We'll be tasting those two very rare and special mezcals, plus at least 3 other expressions that Dave is bringing. More details on everything we'll be drinking below. As usual, we'll order in pizza to make sure nobody's drinking on an empty stomach (which is included). Although Marlowe's beers are not included in the event, everyone's certainly encouraged to buy a couple while you're there -- we definitely will be! :)
In any case, we hope you can join us! As always, anyone who has been to one of our events is welcome to invite friends to join.
Cheers,
Charlie, Yoni and Drammers Club
DETAILS ON WHAT WE’LL BE DRINKING:
New England Barrel Co. Bourbon in a Lord Hobo Stouted Beer Cask. This is a single barrel that our Drammers Boston chapter selected. New England Barrel Co. is an independent bottling company based out of New Hampshire, and it is all the rage in that region — luckily our Boston members jumped on it early. We welcomed their founder James Saunders as a guest speaker for our kickoff Drammers Boston event, and followed that up by tasting through some of his special releases. When we got wind of this barrel - Kentucky Bourbon sourced from Green River and finished in a Lord Hobo stout beer cask. Our Boston chapter made the way up to the NEBCo offices a few months ago and picked a barrel just for our members, and it is yummy -- like a Milky Way candy bar in a bottle. This is actually our newest barrel pick to arrive. Since we selected this barrel, Green River Distillery was acquired by our friends at Bardstown Bourbon Company, so that's definitely a nice vote of confidence! 56.9% abv.
Stauning Danish Whisky - Floor Malted Rye - Double Oaked barrel. Aged 6 years. 57% abv. Drammers Exclusive Single Barrel Pick.
Stauning Danish Whisky - Peated Single Malt - Aged 5 years. 57% abv. Drammers Exclusive Single Barrel Pick.
Our two new Drammers-exclusive single barrels from Denmark's Stauning distillery have arrived and they've started going out to those of you who pre-ordered them. Floor malted rye and peated single malt. We're proud to say they're the first single barrels of Stauning in the US. More details here.
Our friend Dave Lather will be joining this event as our guest speaker -- he is one of the principals at Maguey Melate, a mezcal brand that started as a members club and has grown to offer rare mezcals in stores across the United States. We'll be tasting at least 5 expressions from them, including two expressions that our club selected exclusively for our members:
Chuparrosa Mezcal (or technically "distillate of agave" because they do not go through the process of certification for reasons we can get into at the tasting). This is crazy rare, and by rare we mean that to the best of our knowledge, and we've asked around, it appears only a couple hundred liters of mezcal were made from this rare agave anywhere in Mexico in the last two years. Insane, really, and the flavor is wild, we tend to think of it as potpourri mezcal, and you could say it divides the room. It was one of two batches made by Maestro Isaac Alvarez Rodriguez, one of only two mezcaleros we know of making mezcal from this agave varietal, and we secured the entire batch exclusively for members of our club, thanks to our friends at the great mezcal-of-the-month-club Maguey Melate, who bottled it.
Pulquero by Maestro Felix Hernandez Ruiz. Again, technically agave distillate, and another batch we were proud to source exclusively for our members with our friends at Maguey Melate. This one has a personal story. Our club goes to Oaxaca each year for Day of the Dead (coming up - you're all invited to join!), and after a day of visiting palenques, and working through some amazing food and incredible mezcal bars, those of us left standing at the end of the night often find ourselves at a bar called Mezcalerita, which is fun in part because its simply open later than the others. And after drinking mezcal all day, we like to mix things up by drinking something else -- pulque, made from fermenting the agave sap rather than the plant itself. Think of it like an agave beer, and its great, but it doesn't travel well and is nearly impossible to find in the US. Well, with the pandemic last year, we heard word that Felix Hernandez Ruiz, who makes the pulque for all the top bars in town, was of course struggling -- no tourists meant no bars ordering pulque, so he had been forced to harvest some of the pulquero plants to make a fairly rare pulquero mezcal. When we heard that, we offered to buy it sight unseen -- on the logic that we loved his pulque, and if we couldn't go to Oaxaca last year to drink it, the next best thing is we could bring his pulquero mezcal here to the US. Other than a small number of bottles that our friends at Maguey Melate saved for their members, we bought the entire batch, and as luck would have it, it turned out that it was their most popular release last year among their members. Blind luck, but we'll take it. And it is truly fantastic juice.
Dave will be bringing a few expressions for us to taste as well. These may change, but currently we're expecting he'll be bringing an expression of Espadin mezcal by Luis Enrique Juarez, Mexicano mezcal by Semei García Ramos, and Cuixe by German Manzano Martinez. Knowing Dave he will probably bring more, ha, but we'll almost certainly have at least these 5 expressions of mezcal from Maguey Melate.
That's our lineup, we hope you can join us!
Cheers,
Charlie, Yoni and Drammers Club