Jun. 23: Sierra Norte Mexican Whiskey with Master Distiller Douglas French...

Fellow Drammers!

We’re thrilled to announce a special deep-dive tasting event with our good friend Douglas French, the Master Distiller behind Sierra Norte Mexican Whiskey, which is located in Oaxaca, Mexico. We’ll be tasting all 3 of our new Drammers single barrels, including 2 experimental expressions that Douglas has never released into the world before. The rarest of these by far is his whiskey made from green corn — a project he took on for nearly 10 years, and finally abandoned — not because it isn’t delicious (it is!), but because the green corn just wouldn’t grow consistently — in all that time, he was only able to produce enough true green corn to distill a few barrels worth of whiskey. To our incredible honor, he let our club buy one of them, and we are so proud to be able to offer it to our members (bottled at cask strength of course). Similarly, he let us buy the first barrel he’s ever released into the world of his new rainbow corn whiskey, and we also bought a particularly unusual (and tasty!) single barrel of his yellow corn whiskey. So at this event, we’ll try all 3 of those, plus the other 5 expressions in his core range — single corn varietal distillations of white corn whiskey, yellow corn, black corn, purple corn, and his very rare red corn whiskey. All are made with a mashbill of 85% corn and 15% malted barley in new barrels (so it would qualify as “bourbon” if it were made in the USA, but of course since it’s made in Mexico it is called Mexican whiskey instead.

If you’re just starting to learn about Sierra Norte, they shocked the world a few years ago when their yellow corn whiskey was named one of the Top 20 whiskies in the world across all categories by Whiskey Advocate magazine. That prompted a lot of people in the whiskey world to say “I didn’t know they made whiskey in Mexico”! Today we’re excited to say that there are a lot of Mexican whiskies being made, but other than Abasolo which is distilled near Mexico City, most of the Mexican whiskey distilleries have only started distilling recently, so to our knowledge Sierra Norte has the oldest Mexican whiskey (in terms of stocks of aged whiskey).

Our guest speaker, Master Distiller Douglas French, has long been a good friend of the club, having presented in person at our chapters in Oaxaca and Mexico City, along with distillery visits during our annual Day of the Dead festivities in Oaxaca, but we’ve never had the chance to do a true deep-dive focus with him online until now. In addition to his line of whiskies, he was one of the earliest people to bring mezcal to the global market with his Scorpion Mezcal brand decades ago.

We hope you can join us!

• Format: Online only

• When: Thursday, June 23rd, starting at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern

• Zoom Link / Meeting ID: 856 2686 8942 / Passcode: 062322