Jul. 29: Drammers Denver!...

Fellow Drammers!

We’re excited to announce that our next Denver chapter meetup will be on Thursday, July 29th! Zareen Durrani, who heads up our Denver chapter, has generously offered to host on the rooftop space at her apartment. We’ve assembled an awesome lineup to taste, drumroll please…

• Pittyvaich Single Malt Scotch, 20yo. We picked this bottle up at auction a few years ago and have watched in awe as the price has climbed to nearly 3x what we paid for it in the secondary market. This was part of Diageo's 2009 special release series, 1 of 6,000 bottles released from this little-known (and now closed) distillery, which was built in 1975, closed (permanently) in 1993, and the buildings were demolished in 2002. It is located a few minutes walk from Dufftown, and in full disclosure, though it has its defenders, not everyone is a fan of this distillery on the logic that the distillery was built for blending and some think the distillate doesn't lend itself to longer maturation. Still, this is a very rare chance to try it (don't hold us to it, but this might be one of only 3 bottlings as far as we know). 47.5% abv.

• Laphroaig 13yo Chieftain's Bottling. Laphroaig has long stopped making barrels available to independent bottlers, making these unusual 3rd party bottlings increasingly rare. This one, released under the Chieftain's line, was aged 13 years in a sherry butt, bottled at 13 years old. VERY different than the usual Laphroaig profile, We picked this up from our friends at K&L in LA, and have been waiting for a special occasion to bring it out. NOTE: 58.3% abv!

• Westward - Club Edition - American Single Malt - Tempanilla Cask Finish. We just had an event with our Portland chapter a few days ago, and we managed to pick up a distillery-only special release, which takes their single malt finished in a Tempanilla cask. This is part of their announcement that their whiskey club, previously only available to residents of Oregon, will now be available nationwide, which makes one-off special releases available to club members (like this bottle, which was their most recent release.

• Teeling Irish Whiskey - Carcavelos Cask. We're huge fans of this Irish distillery. The Teeling family first launched the Cooley distillery, which arguably jumpstarted the Irish whiskey scene, long a dormant scene of just Midleton and Bushmills distilleries. After selling Cooley to the Beam Suntory company, the Teelings took their winnings and doubled down on a distillery in Dublin proper, which was once a distilling hotbed, though Teeling was the first distillery to start operating there in nearly 50 years. We've done lots of events with this group, and learned of this rare CA-only bottling, matured in a Carcavelos cask. It is wacky in all the best ways and has long been sold out. 55.7% abv.

• Rare Perfection 14yo Canadian Whisky. Rare Perfection is another popular independent bottler, that made early waves by finding some excellent 20+ year aged bourbon batches. Though of course some found them over-wooded, within the category they seemed to have a bit of the magic touch. So everyone was a little surprised when they announced that their next series, under the same "Rare Perfection" brand, would be Canadian distillate. Intriguing. Did their bourbon-whisperer skills translate North of the border? We're going to find out on Wednesday.

• Saint Cloud Bourbon Batch #2. This is an early release from Saint Cloud that we picked up a couple years ago from our friends at the great liquor shop K&L in LA, long since sold out. We're still learning about Saint Cloud, but here's what we know -- this was "custom distilled" (we assume contract distilled to spec, unclear if it was at the newmake stage though). Unusually, it is matured in new French oak, and it apparently has a high malt content in the mashbill. We're not 100% sure, but we think this is the 13 year aged variety (they have a color coding system, green for 7 years aged, black for 13, as we understand it). Bottled at cask strength.

• Wyoming Whiskey Drammers Private Cask. This is an interesting one -- when this distillery launched, the first in Wyoming since prohibition, it hired former Makers Mark master distillery Steve Nally to show them the ropes. So when he ended that period and went back into retirement, it was surprising to hear that the distillery made some changes to the distilling recipe/process. We decided to explore this, buying two single casks for our club -- one from the Steve Nally era, and one 6 months after he left, after they'd imposed the changes. Remarkably, most of our members prefer the post-Nally cask, which we'll be trying tonight. 58.8% 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 Denver 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.

We hope you can join us!

Cheers,
Charlie