Oct. 20: Boston (Andover)......
Hello Boston/Andover Drammers!
We’re looking forward to our upcoming tasting on Friday, Oct. 20th at 7pm, meeting at 7 Lancaster Place, Andover MA 01810). We’ve got a great lineup that we’ll be tasting through:
High Wire Bourbon Single Barrel. This pick is hot off the presses — a single barrel from the High Wire Distillery in Charleston, North Carolina, featuring their trademark mashbill of 100% Jimmy Red corn, a varietal that they helped resurrect from near-extinction. A 100% corn bourbon is unusual, but certainly qualifies as a bourbon under the rules (if you’re wondering what the difference is between that and “Corn whiskey”, corn whiskey is made using used barrels). This distillery had to basically go into hiding for a few years in 2018 when Garden and Gun Magazine named them the Best Overall Product of the South — this led to a huge surge in sales, and they just didn’t have the inventory to keep up, which ultimately led to a lot of frustrated retailers. So they doubled down, expanded production, stopped all marketing efforts for a while to let things cool down, and waited for their (newly expanded) stock to age. We’ve worked with them over the years and have been counting the seconds — and now 5 years later they’re ready and starting to engage markets again. Working closely with our Charleston chapter, we went to the distillery and selected two single barrels, of which this is the first. Unlike their normal core range offerings, this experimental bourbon was matured using a red wine yeast, resulting in an especially fruity profile. 57.6% abv.
Starlight Distillery - Bourbon Finished in an Turkish Apricot Brandy Cask. 56.25% abv and…
Starlight Distillery - Mesquite-Smoked Bourbon Finished in an Oloroso Sherry Cask. 55.9% abv. We also recently received two new bourbon barrel picks from this distillery, which is located in Indiana, close to Louisville. Our Indianapolis members have been raving about it for years, and we couldn’t believe our eyes when we visited the distillery last year — it’s ENORMOUS. It must be producing more bourbon than the next 10 “craft” distilleries combined. And it’s great bourbon at that. We immediately set out to do a barrel pick and ended up picking four barrels for the club (including one Brazilian rum that we’ll have at the end of the year). Of these first two we selected, one was aged 5.5 years, features a mashbill that includes corn that was mesquite-smoked before distillation, and was finished in an oloroso sherry cask. The other was aged 4 years and finished in a Turkish apricot brandy cask, which the head of our Indianapolis chapter, Sean Crain, says may be the best single barrel of Starlight he's ever tasted (and that's saying something!). Both bottled at cask strength of course.
Barrell Whiskey Private Release - Amaro Cask Finish. We can say confidently that you haven't had anything like this before! Our friends at Barrell Craft Spirits had an opportunity to buy a tanker of American whiskey -- some company had intended to make a flavored whiskey out of it, but ran out of money. They knew it was probably bourbon, and it certainly tasted good, but they couldn't prove it met all the technical specs to call it bourbon, so they called "Kentucky Whiskey", and then set about filling it into a wide array of fun finishing casks, including this one in a St. Agrestis Amaro cask, bottled at 56.9% abv. If you’re not familiar with amaro, it’s a bitter that is often used in cocktails, and it’s a powerful flavor — we’ve never actually heard of it used to finish a whiskey other than this one. It's wildly original, and our members picked this out of 7 different samples for our barrel pick event, so this is exclusive to Drammers. 56.93% abv
Smooth Ambler Old Scout 5yo. We picked this barrel for our club live at their distillery in 2020. We've long been big fans -- we had the honor of welcoming John Little and the team in person at a meeting in Brooklyn back in 2016. They’ve always been up front that their Old Scout line is sourced at MGP, which is great because we love MGP, and John has one of the best talents in the business for sniffing out the best barrels. Anyway, we mourned when they had to shut down their Old Scout line temporarily while they searched for more barrels that met their high standards, and so of course when they announced it was coming back in Spring 2020, we were in the front of the line waiting to throw a party for the first barrels to arrive — and they did not disappoint. 56.9% abv.
Sazerac Rye - Single Barrel (Selected by Drammers Las Vegas). Sazerac is the parent company of Buffalo Trace, and they also own the Barton 1792 Distillery, which makes this excellent, affordably-priced rye whiskey. It is notoriously rare to get a single barrel from Sazerac — unsurprisingly, they are in very high demand, so our club was blown away last year when we had the opportunity to buy 3 single casks of Sazerac Rye (our Warsaw, Los Angeles and Las Vegas chapters selected them respectively — this one was selected by our Las Vegas chapter. It is beautiful tweak on their normal recipe, with a little more honey in the mix. 45% abv.
Dakabend 4yo Mexican Rum. This is one of only 2 barrels of aged Dakabend rum that has ever been made available anywhere — the only place you could have gotten it prior to now with our club is if you made the 4.5 hour drive from Oaxaca Centro up into the Sierra Norte mountains, which is what we did in 2020 when we learned that as an experiment a little over 4 years ago, they aged 3 barrels of rum. Master Distiller Edgar Ramirez and his cousin Elisandro Ramirez learned rum making from Edgar’s father when they were children, and although most of their time today is spent on the rockstar mezcal brand they started (Mezcal Tosba), they also produce an unaged Dakabend rum which is available for sale in the US. But this, 4yo aged version is another beast altogether, truly jaw dropping. Our members had a chance to try it during an online tasting earlier this year with Edgar and Elisandro (a recording of which you can see up in our video library, where they discuss this in depth). The rum is made from 100% pure sugar cane, harvested and pressed the same day. To say this is rare is one helluva understatement. Btw, the word “Dakabend” in their village means “the ones who don’t listen”, and is a reference to how the people in their town saw Edgar and Elisandro after they announced they wanted to start a distillery and everyone told them it was a bad idea and thought they were foolhardy to continue with the plan. Well, when you taste this rum, we think you’ll be glad they didn’t listen too.
5 Sentidos - Tobala Mezcal by Tio Pedro. The Maestro Mezcalero behind this mezcal, Tio Pedro, has worked for many top mezcal producers over the years and recently set out on his own, where among other things he produced this small 92 liter batch. This is only just arrived (which is why it's not pictured above) and features wild tobalas he collected and distilled in Oaxaca in June of 2022. He then rested is in glass until December 2022 adjusting with heads and tails to reach the desired flavor and bottled at 47% abv. This batch was selected by our members on our annual trip to Oaxaca for Day of the Dead last year and is available exclusively to members of the club.
That’s our lineup, we hope you can join us! We’ll have food on hand (included, likely bbq). It promises to be a fun evening.
Cheers!
Charlie, Steve, Tash and Drammers Club