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Fellow Drammers!
We’re excited to announce that on Dec. 6th at 3pm EST / Noon Pacific in the US, we’re welcoming back our friend Dr. Pat Heist, who happens to be one of America’s most talented whiskeymakers. Dr. Patis of course the co-founder and Master Distiller at Wilderness Trail, not to mention FermSolutions, the industry-leading company he founded to provide expertise in fermentation to the industry. For those of you who were able to join the 10 year anniversary of our Drammers Club in NYC, you’ll recall it was just 2 months prior, and we had the honor of welcoming Dr. Pat’s band to join us and play at our anniversary party — it was one helluva night. Needless to say, we’ve been preparing for this event for a long time. Not only will we try our two cask strength Drammers single barrels (one bourbon selected in 2024 and one rye selected earlier this year) but also probably the rarest Wilderness Trail bottle ever released — the 10 year anniversary bottling that was only available at the distillery in person at 10am on Dec. 8th, 2023 — the morning of Wilderness Trail’s 10 year anniversary party. If you weren’t in line an hour before they opened, you weren’t getting a bottle (luckily Summer and I were there two hours early). So are we saving this bottle since it’s such a historic release? Fuck no! Whiskey this special was made to be drank — we picked up two bottles of it that we’ve been saving to use for this tasting!
A little more about our headliner bottle. This 10 year old bourbon was the 2nd barrel that co-founders Dr. Pat and Shane Baker ever distilled, back when they were basically distilling on a small pot still in a shed, closer to what you’d think of as hobby distilling than the massive whiskey empire they went on to create and sell to Campari years later. Still a “sweet mash” in their signature style, creating one barrel required a full 12 hour day on their equipment back then. It’s a wheated bourbon mashbill of 64% corn, 24% wheat and 12% malted barley. The barrel only yielded 115 bottles, and of that only 75 or so bottles were actually made available for sale to the public (they were first made available to distillery employees, after which only 75 or so remained). So to say that this is a rare release is obviously an understatement, it’s almost certainly their rarest release ever put out by Wilderness Trail
We hope you can join us! Here’s the full lineup 6 pours total:
10 Year Old Wheated Bourbon - 10 Year Anniversary Bottling - Bottled in Bond 50% abv. Barrel #L0513
Drammers Pick - Wilderness Trail - Family Reserve Cask Strength Single Barrel Bourbon. Barrel no 771648, aged 5 years, 3 months, aged in an ISC (Independent Stave Co.) classic #4 barrel, rickhouse E-N25-10-4, Yeast strain FP1. 55.4% abv, 1 of 204 bottles.
Drammers Pick - Wilderness Trail Single Barrel Rye Pick which we named “Marshmallow Rainbow”. Barrel No.: 751059, aged 5 Years, 11 Months, Barrel Type: ISC Classic #4, Yeast Straing: 048. 53.2% abv.
Cask Strength Single Barrel Pick selected by Bill Thomas, the owner of Jack Rose Dining Saloon in Washington DC. He has been a longtime supporter of Wilderness Trail, and in fact the first time we did a Drammers event for Wilderness Trail in NYC in 2019, Bill Thomas was actually the presenter! One day last year I was visiting with Bill and you could tell he was very excited to show me his new single barrel. He wouldn’t tell me anything about it, he just put a glass in front of me and said “You’re not going to believe this, tell me what you’re tasting”. It was bonkers, I was still trying to put my finger on the right descriptors when Bill let me off the hook “it has FERNET TASTING NOTES!!!”. Indeed it does. Appropriately, he named it “Fernet Con Rye”. Aged 4 Years, 8 Months, Cask Strength, 52.15% abv
Kentucky Bourbon Festival Single Cask Bottling - each year Wilderness Trail puts out a special single cask release for the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, and we have one from the 2021 festival and one from the 2022 festival, both are Family Reserve Cask Strength bottlings (Barrel Nos 16L19-E6 and 779838 respectively). Each person who signs up for this tasting will get a pour of one or the other, and it’ll be random who gets which expression.
Wilderness Trail Official Bottling of their High-Rye Bourbon. Although Wilderness Trail has made a name for itself by mostly making wheated bourbons, they do have a high-rye bourbon expression too, so we had to include that in the tasting. 50% abv.
That’s our lineup, we hope you can join us! Please let us know if you have any questions.
Cheers,
Drammers Club