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Kansas City Drammers!
Here's our lineup for our Drammers Kansas City lineup on Friday, January 22nd starting at 5:30pm at Frank’s Place, and we're very grateful that Frank Nieto, the head of our KC chapter, has agreed to host. We've got a really fun lineup that we'll be tasting through, drumroll please...
GlenAllachie, Aged 15 Years. This is a Speyside Single Malt Scotch, aged 15 years, made under the helm of legendary master distiller Billy Walker. The distillery has been around since 1967, but was used predominantly for blends (today a lot of their distillate finds its way into Chivas Regal). With the rise in popularity of single malts, they launched their own single malt line in 2018, and are starting to gain a real cult following. Back in November, we had the privilege of welcoming their Director of Sales and Marketing David Keir for an in-depth, 3 hour discussion, which you can find in the Video Library at Drammers.com. 46% abv.
Jim Beam Signature Craft Releases - Brown Rice and Red Wheat. We're big fans of Jim Beam here at Drammers Club, and while their core range is widely known and celebrated, few know of their unusual experimental releases. At this event we'll be trying two of them -- the 11yo bourbon made with brown rice in the mashbill, another 11yo with a soft red wheat in the mashbill, which produce starkly different flavor profiles. 45% abv for each.
Two Expressions of Westland - American Single Malt - Medium Peated and Heavily Peated. Made from 100% barley just like a single malt scotch, but aged in Seattle where it’s made. We started to hear in late 2018 that they had decided to shut down their single cask program for at least 5 years. Assuming that's still their plan, that means that while their normal core range products are available in stores, it will be 4+ years before you’ll be able to find the much higher proof, cask strength version of their whisky anywhere outside the distillery gift shop. Luckily, our club is close with the distillery team, and they let us buy the very last 2 casks out of their single barrel program. We'll be tasting both tomorrow, one is medium peated (cask #430, 62.1% abv), and the other is heavily peated at (cask #3240 at 60.2% abv).
Medley Bros. Exclusive Select Cask Kentucky Straight Bourbon (Denver pick). Another club barrel pick, this time a fantastic unfiltered bourbon. It was produced by the Medley family, which is one of the oldest families in American whiskey, dating back to the late 1700s. In our view, this is one of those rare bourbons that is truly top-end (among other things, the Van Winkle family used to buy their rye from them), but whose availability has not yet been destroyed by the bottle flippers on Facebook. They did a special year-end program a year ago, where they released 25 "honey barrels" exclusively to clubs across the country, and we were honored that they selected our club for New York, Los Angeles and Denver -- we'll be tasting the Denver barrel at our tasting in Kansas City this week. Bottled at cask strength, completely unfiltered, at 56.7% for the Denver barrel.
Rezpiral Capon Espadin - We love mezcal here at Drammers Club, and we take great pride in going to Oaxaca to meet with the folks we want to work with to make sure we're on board with what they're doing. Rezpiral is an incredible company that feels as strongly as we do about making sure the maestro mezcaleros are being taken care of -- so much so that not only do they buy the mezcal at fair market prices, but they actually grow rare agaves on their own and give them to the mezcaleros for free, AND they give 30% of the profits from mezcal sales back to the producers, which is unheard of in this industry. We've selected 5 exclusive batches with them, all very special. The first is by maestro Mezcalero Aureliano Hernandez, and it is a "Capon" or "castrated" espadin, which we'll explain at the event, but it makes it sweeter than a normal espadin. It was also rested in glass for over 8 months, which made an enormous difference. on the final flavor. 46% abv.
Rezpiral Tobasiche- Next we'll be trying a tobasiche mezcal from Simeon and Apolonio Ramirez, whose palenque we had the pleasure of visiting in 2019. Unlike the sweeter capon espadin, which has some flavors that overlap with the whisky flavor wheel, tobasiche is more clearly in its own earthy and vegetal space, a true mezcal for mezcal lovers. These plants can take from 10 to 20 years to grow before they can be harvested for mezcal. Note that both Rezpiral offerings are technically "spirits distilled from agave" as they do not go through the mezcal certification process, which we'll also explain at the event. 50.9% abv.
That's our lineup! We hope you can join us.
Cheers,
Charlie