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Hello Baltimore Drammers!
You’re invited to join us for another tasting of rare whiskey and spirits on Wednesday, July 17th at 7pm. A big thank you to Matt for organizing and hosting us at his great Meander Art Bar (address: 1801 E Lombard St, Baltimore, MD 21231). We’ve got a great lineup of unusual whiskies:
Ardnamurchan Peated 6yo - Peated 6yo Drammers Single Barrel Pick #110. Distilled at the Ardnamurchan Distillery, which has been around now for over 10 years, but they are still arguably one of the hottest of the newer crop of young Scotch distilleries. Cask #1520, distilled in 2018, matured in a Peated First Fill Oloroso Sherry Hogshead, 1 of 320 bottles, 58.6% abv. Wait until you see how dark this liquid is (no color added of course!).
Linkwood Distillery Unpeated 14yo (Independent Bottling by Adelphi). This is another single cask pick selected by Drammers Club (pick #111), and it’s not a coincidence that they arrived at the same time (Adelphi is the parent company that built and owns the Ardnamurchan distillery, so we picked these casks together). This pick is also ridiculously dark. Matured in a 1st Fill PX Sherry Cask. Distilled in 2011, Bottled in 2025, 1 of 217 bottles, 53.5% abv.
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.
Copper & Kings Brandy - Finished in a Tequila Cask. This barrel pick recently arrived from Copper & Kings distillery in Louisville, Kentucky. They specialize in American brandy and here we've got a single barrel of their grape brandy aged in a tequila cask, bottled at cask strength of 62.5% abv. It’ll be fun to compare this to the grape brandy finished bourbon from Starlight! It is available exclusively to members of our club.
Sierra Norte Mexican Whiskey
Green Corn Single Barrel. 52.8% abv
Rainbow Corn Single Barrel. 61.2% abv
Yellow Corn Single Barrel. 48.3% abv
Sierra Norte made huge waves a few years ago when their bourbon-style yellow corn whiskey was named by Whiskey Advocate as one of the Top 20 whiskies in the world across all categories, and their master distiller Douglas French has taken that several steps further. Applying what he learned cultivating seed banks in his decades of building the Scorpion Mezcal brand, when he turned his hand to whiskey, he worked to isolate individual corn varietals, planting and refining them over decades to produce separate whiskies distilled using only white corn, or yellow corn, green corn, black corn, purple corn, and more recently red, green and rainbow corn. They’re all made like a bourbon (but in Mexico, so you can’t call it bourbon, which by definition has to be made in the United States). The mashbill is 85% corn, 15% malted barley, distilled on the same small copper pot stills that he uses to make his Scorpion mezcal. When our club visited Oaxaca last October, we picked 3 special single barrels. The first was a mind-altering variant of their award-winning yellow corn whiskey, with huge green pepper/jalapeno notes, very different from his standard release. Next, he let us buy the very first (and to our knowledge still the only) barrel of rainbow corn whiskey that he has ever released. And most precious, he let us buy one of only two barrels of green corn whiskey that he barreled before abandoning the green corn project (it just wasn’t adapting to the Oaxacan environment, so he had to let it go — making our barrel incredibly rare, one of only 2 barrels he ever produced, and he’s not making any more of it).
That’s our lineup, we hope you can join us! Please let us know if you have any questions. We’ll order in light food from Meander Art Bar. And, as always, we ask that everyone arrange a ride home — obviously we’ll be drinking a lot of high proof stuff.
Cheers!
Charlie, Matt and Drammers Club