Sep. 10: Drammers Boston w/ Devin Villardi, Westland's Brand Ambassador!...
Fellow Drammers!
Our next Drammers Boston event is Friday, September 10th, starting at 7pm, at Lily's Pizza (outside on their deck), which is right downtown (2 Oliver St, Boston, MA 02109). We had initially announced that we would be welcoming Alex White, founder of the awesome Rezpiral mezcal, but some visa issues crept up, so we'll instead welcome him at our next meeting. In his place, we're very excited to announce that our good friend Devin Vilardi has generously agreed to come be our guest speaker instead.
We have had the pleasure of working with Devin for several years now in other roles, and we were very excited when we learned he had joined the team at one of our favorite distilleries - Westland, based in Seattle, which specializes exclusively in American Single Malt whiskey. Devin will join us in person to tell us all about what they're working on, and they're honestly working on some amazing stuff (see below). They've actually got a really exciting blind taste test program that we're going to be participating in later this year, so we'll be seeing Devin again in the coming months, and as a result we decided it would be fun to mix in a few non-Westland expressions on this tasting as well. Check out our lineup, drumroll please....
Westland - Colere - Inaugural Edition. We'll kick things off with Westland's newest release, hot off the presses. This is the first release in this series that will anchor their much talked-about revamp of the Westland core line. The Colere series will focus on the impact of grain varietals on flavor, from their website: This is the first in what will be an ongoing annual inquiry into unique varieties of barley bred outside the commodity system with flavor first as a goal. Colere Edition 1 is made with the varietal that began it all, Alba (a six-row winter barley) and intentionally matured in only used casks to relegate the oak influence to a supporting role and focus the attention on the grain itself. This is an exciting and timely topic. Just this month, the new book out from the WhiskyExchange team Everything You Need to Know About Whisky (But Are Too Afraid to Ask), reiterates the view more common in scotchier parts of the world that "individual varieties of barley actually play little part in delivering specific flavour characteristics to the final matured whisky, despite some distillers' claims to the contrary". Gauntlet thrown! And if you think that's bad, you should read what they say on p38 of the book on the topic, but we digress. This is potentially a crucial area where American Single Malt and single malt Scotch are (perhaps) diverging. Anyway, next up...
Westland Garryana Edition 5 - With the release of Garryana 6 imminent, we thought this would be a fun look back at last year's release. This whisky is arguably an even bigger deal than the last one -- although some (albeit too few) other distilleries have focused on grain varietals, ain't nobody played around with this completely different type of wood to mature whisky like Westland has. We hear a lot about Quercus Alba (American Oak), and Quercus Robur (a variety of European oak), and nobody disputes the disparate impact these two types of wood have on maturing whisky. But other than some recent maturation efforts using Japanese mizunara oak, almost no one in the industry is experimenting with Garryana oak, other than Westland which has absolutely pioneered the space, and again the impact is unique and profound, making this really fun and different.
Westland - 2 Drammers Single Casks. These are two of the earliest single barrel picks our club selected, and we are very proud of them. Luckily we had already done a number of events with their head distiller Matt Hoffman and other members of the Westland team when word started to get around that they were going to shut down their single barrel program -- meaning virtually no cask strength Westlands would be available outside of visiting the distillery FOR 5 YEARS -- egad! Well, we love cask strength Westland, so we jumped into action and begged them to sell us a cask before they shut down the program. Not only did they say yes, but they let us buy two casks, an incredible honor, and we later found out we had been allowed to buy the last two casks before they shut down the program. Whew. That was in 2019, so (according to the original plan at least) we have as much as 3 more years before cask strength single casks will be available again. We picked these two because they showcase a stunning range of flavor. Although theoretically peated to the same levels, cask #430 comes across as much more moderately peated, whereas cask #3240 is perhaps the smokiest/peatiest Westland we've ever come across. Btw, how cool is it that we have one of their first 500 casks!?! Both of these clock in north of 62% abv. Anyway...
We'll also include a few not from Westland: a bourbon, a rye and two very unusual mezcals...
High West American Prairie Bourbon - Finished in a Rivesaltes fortified wine cask (Drammers barrel pick #26). We're huge fans of this distillery, which is located in Park City, Utah and makes their own whiskey, but also sources whiskey from MGP as they did with this barrel. The High West team prides themselves on their blending skills, which makes single barrels a challenge -- after all, how do you show off blending skills on a single barrel! Their solution is to only release single barrels that are finished in interesting ways, and we were very proud to have the opportunity to select this single barrel finished in a fortified Rivselates wine cask.
High West Double Rye - Finished in a Cognac Cask (Drammers barrel pick #25). Same story as above regarding only releasing single barrels with interesting finishes -- this one is finished in cognac, and I personally find an incredible menthol/mint finish on it, though not everyone does.
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, I call it a 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.
That's our lineup, we hope you can join us! A huge thank you to our Boston co-heads Steve and Tash for organizing!
Cheers!
Drammers Club
When: Friday, September 10th, starting at 7pm
Where: Lily’s Pizza, downtown (outside on their deck), 2 Oliver St, Boston, MA 02109
Cost: $40/person for Drammers Members / $50/person for Drammers Observers
Food: pizza included!