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Fellow Drammers,
What an exciting day - the launch of our first exclusive bottling, only available to members of Drammers Club! I'm going to be sending out an email soon with more details, but this Tuesday at 7pm, feel free to come taste the first 6 exclusive Drammers bottlings, which will only be available to Drammers Members:
- 2x Westland Single Casks No. 3240 & No. 430 -
Westland recently decided to shut down their private cask series for the next 5 years. Luckily, we have a great relationship with them -- among other things you'll recall we hosted their master distiller Matt Hoffman at a Drammers NYC event a couple years back. Well, they did us a favor and set aside their very last two single casks for us at Drammers, Cask No. 3240 (204 bottles total) and Cask No. 430 (202 bottles total), which are both delicious and yet so different. Put another way, for the next 5 years, the public will only be able to buy the core range Westland bottlings which are delicious but only available at 46% ABV. Only Drammers Members will be able to access these last two single cask releases, at 60.2% and 62.1% ABV. Available at $120/bottle.
- 3x Drammers Medley Bourbon Special Ltd. Release - NYC, LA and Denver Barrel Picks! -
As I'm sure all or most of you know, the Medley Bros. bourbon company did a special release for December, where of all their tens of thousands of barrels, they picked out their 25 best barrels of the year, all aged 8 years or more, and set them aside to only be available to select whiskey clubs nationwide. We had the honor of being selected for LA, NYC and Denver, and each chapter met to choose between 3 to 6 of these special barrels before selecting one, all with owner Sam Medley joining us in person. These barrels are exquisite, shockingly different, and I'm proud to say that our club picked some truly exceptional barrels at each tasting. In particular, there were far fewer bottles resulting from the LA barrel than the NYC and Denver barrels, which may explain why it was so tasty and unusual! In any case, this will be our first chance to do a side-by-side, comparing what our clubs selected in each city. The NYC barrel comes in at 124.28 proof, LA came in at 126.65 proof and Denver comes in at 113.28 proof. The bottles are provided at cost, $81.63/bottle for the NYC pick, $75.65 for the LA bottle and I'm still awaiting pricing for the Denver bottle.
- Rezpiral "Capon" Rested Espadin Mezcal -
Last but far from least, we're proud to present our first mezcal. Rezpiral is the brainchild of Alex White, who we've had the pleasure of visiting with in Oaxaca the last 2 years, and even volunteered a day transplanting baby tobala mezcal to new farmland so they could continue to grow! When we did our event with him in NYC, we came to learn about what makes a "capon" mezcal so special. As a favor to Drammers Club, Alex hand-wrote a 7 page booklet explaining the Capon process, a copy of which will come with each bottle. Another thing to note is that this mezcal was rested in glass for over 6 months before it was bottled, which my fellow mezcal nerds know has an enormous impact on making a mezcal that much more tasty. We picked this batch of mezcal both because it tastes amazing, and because we are huge supporters of what Alex does -- his work is funded by grants, to empower single-family mezcal producers to sell their mezcal at fair market prices, and his Rezpiral brand was created to enable that. We had the honor of meeting the mezcalero behind this gem, Mr. Aureliano Hernandez when we were in Oaxaca this past August. Each bottle comes with a hand-written sticker that reads "In solidarity with the macroeconomy and the micro political, this mezcal selected for the Drammers Club". Provided at cost at $81.63/bottle.
Those are the bottles we'll be tasting, and for those interested in buying bottles, I can explain how you can get them. As an added fun bonus, the first people to buy bottles will get a chance to try pours of the Founder's release set from Bimber distillery, a new distillery in West London (we're touring it at our Drammers London event on Feb. 5th). They offered Founding Member slots, so I bought one so that we could buy a Drammers barrel soon, and it came with a box of special, founders-only experimental releases (picture below), mini-bottles of new-make, peated finish, re-charred, ex-sherry, ex-bourbon and virgin oak single malts. I'll use 3 for the NYC tasting and 3 for the LA tasting, first-come first-served to people who buy bottles on Monday.
At the end of the night, as usual, I'll bring out our leftover bottles from past events. And of course we'll have pizza.