Drew Beard
Maryland’s Baltimore Whiskey Company is producing far more than just whiskey. In fact, their portfolio has become so varied that they changed their name recently to Baltimore Spirits Company. We haven’t even reviewed one of their whiskeys. They only offer one. Why were they called Baltimore Whiskey Company to begin with? Anyway. Our first taste…
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Washington, DC’s One Eight Distilling has been bottling its own rye and bourbon under the District Made brand for a year or so now. But the Untitled series that started their foray into brown spirits hasn’t taken a back seat. While harder to find, the line continues to be a successful outlet for experimentation with…
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Goose Island is well known for its Bourbon County barrel-aged line, but there are several other beers in their Barrel House offerings that don’t touch a bourbon barrel. One of those is this: Islay Scotch Barrel Imperial Stout. This beer is aged in barrels from Scotland’s Ardbeg Distillery, which uses malt peated to between 50 and…
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New Riff Distilling hasn’t wasted any time adding a single barrel offering to their core lineup. Most of these will enter the market as private barrel selections, so expect to see plenty of liquor store and bourbon club picks popping up in the near future. Here’s more from New Riff: At New Riff, single barrel…
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Since Halloween is quickly approaching, it seems only appropriate to review a whiskey from a distillery with the tagline “Made by Ghosts.” Kentucky’s Boone County Distilling Co. is referring here to the ghosts of distillers past, specifically those that founded and operated Boone County’s Petersburg Distillery which was the largest bourbon producer in the state…
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There are plenty of wine books out there, and a smaller, yet not insignificant, number of books on beer. Spirits books, mostly focusing on the recent whiskey craze, seem to hit the shelves every other week. Few authors, however, attempt to cover all types of alcohol, much less place it in the context of recorded…
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Pick up any book about the history of whiskey in America, and you’ll probably read that rye, not bourbon, was the first whiskey distilled in these United States, with “Maryland-style” being one of the more popular offerings. The category almost completely disappeared not long after the repeal of Prohibition, but Sagamore Spirit in Baltimore is…
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The explosion in barrel-aged beers has led to a growing trend in the cellar aging of these brews. High in alcohol content with boozy barrel notes, barrel-aged beers are widely believed to improve, like many wines, with a year or more in the bottle. California’s Firestone Walker Brewery has an impressive stock of barrel-aged beers…
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In the 18 years since Compass Box began blending whisky, there have been only four special editions of Hedonism, the grain whisky that put the whiskymaker on the map. We sampled the first of these, Maximus, back in 2008, but the 10th anniversary release, which yielded only 144 bottles, unsurprisingly eluded us (as has the most…
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Virginia Distillery Co. is continuing an impressive trend of creative cask finishing with Brewers Batch Virginia-Highland Whisky. This new and limited addition to the line-up features finishing casks sourced from local breweries. With this first release, Virginia Distilling Co. kept it close to home working with Three Notch’d Brewing Company in Central Virginia. Three Notch’d…
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