Drew Beard
The beer-loving world breathed a sigh of relief with the quality of the 2016 Goose Island Bourbon County series after the lactic souring issues that plagued some of the 2015 releases. To make things even better, in 2017, the series officially expanded to six offerings: Original, Barleywine, Coffee, Proprietor’s, Northwoods, and Knob Creek Reserve. There…
The number of craft whiskey distilleries in America continues to rise, but only a fraction of them can bottle their own distillate as a “straight whiskey,” meaning it’s at least two years old. Even fewer can claim to be bottling at 5-plus years, which is comparable in age to the core products from industry big…
Kentucky Owl was once known only to a truly dedicated set of whiskey drinkers who paid exorbitant retail prices (and worse on the secondary market) for the brand’s extremely limited bourbon releases sourced from an undisclosed distillery or distilleries in Kentucky. You may still have never heard of Kentucky Owl, but after its sale to…
While you’ll find The Silver Dollar on many lists of the best whiskey bars in the country, the impressive brown water offerings at this funky and casual spot are not even mentioned in the “About” section of their website. The bar is a take on a 1950s Bakersfield, California honky-tonk, complete with rustic décor (exposed…
You may have heard over the summer that George Clooney sold his start-up tequila company, Casamigos, to spirits industry titan Diageo for an amount approaching a billion dollars. That’s right. A cool billion. While that price seems high, it’s reportedly the fastest growing super-premium tequila brand in America. We’ve already reviewed Casamigos Blanco and Reposado,…
Like most discerning drinkers, we here at Drinkhacker have many questions we’d like to ask the people behind our favorite wine, beer, or spirit. Every now and then, we get the opportunity to actually do so. For the first in our series of short interviews, we talked to the “the Buddha of Bourbon” himself and…
In the whisky world, single casks are great because they offer the opportunity to try a unique and rare version of an otherwise familiar spirit. Glenfarclas’ Family Casks go one step further and let you pick across vintages spanning five decades. Since 2007, this Speyside distillery owned by the Grant family has produced more than…
While only an hour and a half outside of Washington, D.C., Copper Fox Distillery in Sperryville, Virginia seems worlds away from any city. Many new distilleries today are taking up shop in suburban business parks or urban warehouse spaces, which makes this location, in an old 1930s apple warehouse and cider mill at the foot…
Barrel aging has become wildly popular in the craft-brewing world, but it remains, for the most part, a process almost exclusively applied to darker beers like porters and stouts. No strangers to pushing the envelope with their brews, California-based Firestone Walker Brewing Company bucks that trend with its Helldorado Blonde Barley Wine Ale, which is…
If you haven’t already noticed, whiskey prices are going up across the board, particularly for older single malts. The record for a single bottle price at auction exceeded six figures just last year (a Yamazaki from Japan, no less), and there’s still no sign we’ve hit the ceiling. Even readily available older single malts, like…