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Fellow Drammers!
We’re excited to launch our 3rd Drammers Club chapter in Oaxaca, Mexico, following over a year of events in Mexico City and our newly-launched Merida, Mexico chapter! We’re delighted and grateful that Asis Cortes of Dixebe mezcal (among other things) has generously agreed to host us at Puro Burro for this month’s meeting, and Bernardo of Noble Coyote mezcal has already offered to host our next meeting in January!
There’s more information about our club up at Drammers.com, but our general hope is to get together regularly, as close to once a month as we can, to taste rare whiskies and other spirits. Of course, we like to say here at Drammers Club that the whiskey is just the excuse to get together — the real reason we enjoy getting together is to hang out with the other members, which is why we take membership seriously, and we rely exclusively on our members to invite other members (in other words, we’re not open to the public, but any of you, our founding members, are free to invite anyone you recommend). We also offer online events and we buy barrels of exceptional whiskey and batches of exceptional mezcal and other spirits exclusively for our members which are available to members who choose to pay the annual $99/year membership dues, but that’s not required — you can attend our events (like on Monday), by registering for free as what we call a “Drammers Observer”, and then we do the events at cost (on Monday it’s actually below cost at just $10/person which includes some snacks).
We’ve put together an incredible whisky lineup for our kickoff event:
Bowmore 18yo - For many Scotch nerds. single malt scotch from Islay is the ultimate, and the Bowmore distillery is one of the most respected. Not as peaty or smokey as the heaviest hitters on the island (Ardbeg, Laphroaig, etc.), but more peaty and smokey than some of the lighter whiskies coming from the north of the Island (Bruichladdich, Octomore excepted of course), Bowmore falls right in the middle, and a delicious middle it is. This is their 18 year old expression.
Paul John Indian Single Malt - 2019 Christmas Edition. Indian whisky has been exploding on the scene in recent years, led by this distillery, Paul John, and our friends at the Amrut distillery in Bengaluru. We follow every move both distilleries make with great interest, and not only because we have a chapter of our club in Mumbai. We’re such big fans of Paul John, in fact, that our club will be the first in the Americas to offer a private single cask that we selected exclusively for our members earlier this year (our Mumbai chapter picked a second cask too). While we wait for those bottles to arrive, and since it is the holiday season, we thought we’d enjoy this, one of their limited annual releases (the 2019 was their second edition, with their single malt whisky finished in special Pedro Ximenez sherry casks).
High West Distillery - American Prairie Bourbon Finished in a Rivesaltes Wine Cask. Speaking of private casks, we were very proud that our club was entrusted by the great craft distillery High West in Park City Utah with their only 2 private casks in the New York market this Winter, and this is one of them. It’s their trademark American Prairie bourbon finished in a Rivesaltes wine cask (a fortified, sweet wine). It’s extraordinary and only available to our members through our website and at tastings like this one. We also selected a barrel of rye finished in a Cognac cask that we’ll taste at a future meeting. High West has been around for over a decade at this point, and has always been very up front that in addition to making their own whiskey, they also buy whiskey made at other distilleries (in this case, almost certainly at the MGP distillery in Indiana), and they take great pride in their blending skills, so American Prairie is branded as a blend of straight bourbon whiskies.
Kilbeggan Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey. We’re also huge fans of Irish whiskey, especially Single Pot Still Irish whiskey, which has a long tradition in Ireland. In fact, our Oaxaca meeting is taking place the day after our online “Drammers Book Club” event with the author of arguably the definitive book on Irish whisky A Glass Apart by Fionnan O’Connor, where we tasted 5 Irish whiskies and discussed this fantastic book with its author, the third event in our book club series (next month’s book is a Canadian whiskey book with its author). The Kilbeggan distillery is ancient, dating back to 1757, though it had a long dormant period (like so many great Irish distilleries), only to be resurrected in recent years as part of a renaissance of premium Irish whiskies, and they have fairly small, limited releases for the time being.
Wyoming Whiskey - Outryder. This whiskey hailing from Wyoming not only tastes great, it has an incredible story. We’ll get into the longer version of the story at the event, but essentially the distillery hired a famous retired master distiller from Maker’s Mark distillery when they launched, and that man did not like rye whiskey, not one bit. They insisted he make a rye whiskey, and years later when it had aged in barrels long enough and was ready to drink, they found he’d played a bit of a trick on them to show how much he despised rye whiskey — he had secretly distilled it with a mash bill of 48% rye, rather than the minimum 51% needed to sell it in the US market as a rye. The result is a unique product that’s unlikely to be seen in the market again, and they had to call it “Outryder” (a cowboy reference) and simply list it as an American whiskey, ha. All that said, it’s truly delicious.
Widow Jane - Oak and Apple Wood Aged. This whiskey is from our friends at Widow Jane in Brooklyn, NYC. Like High West, they make some of their own whiskey, but even more heavily rely on sourcing great whiskey and blending it expertly, and diluting it with water from New York state that they are very proud of. This is unusual in that the spirit is aged in an apple wood cask, resulting in a yummy and smooth whiskey (distilled from a rye mash).
That’s our official lineup, and for those who show up early, we’ll almost certainly have some additional whiskey left over from our events in Merida on Saturday and Mexico City on Sunday. We hope you can join us, and please feel free to contact us with any questions.