Balcones Texas Single Malt Whisky is made from (you guessed it) 100% malted barley. According to sources on the web (since the Balcones website is a glossy brochure with no real information), they use 100% Golden Promise barley, much of it grown in Texas. This is mashed and distilled using their copper pot stills and then aged in a combination of…
Woodinville Straight Bourbon is a Washington State straight bourbon that is pot distilled by Woodinville Whiskey Company in Woodinville, Washington state. The distillery, established in 2010, was acquired in 2017 by Moët Hennessy (LVMH), which might explain why it’s now popping up on store shelves. All of the grain for distillation comes locally, from…
Woodinville 100% Rye is a straight rye that is pot distilled by Woodinville Whiskey Company in Woodinville, Washington state. The distillery, established in 2010, was acquired in 2017 by Moët Hennessy (LVMH), which might explain why it’s now popping up on store shelves. All of the grain for distillation comes from…
The Texas Pot Still Bourbon uses a unique mash bill of four grains: roasted blue corn, Texas wheat, Texas rye and malted barley. The flavor makes me think they’re using a darker malt on the barley than is standard for most malt whiskies, but I can’t find any verification online.
All Balcones whiskeys are pot distilled in batches and bottled without chill-filtration or added coloring. This particular bottle (which sounds downright placid next to siblings like Blue Corn Whiskey and Brimstone Oak-Smoked Bourbon) is distilled from a mash bill of 100% rye, including Elbon Rye from Northwest Texas and crystal, chocolate and roasted rye malts.
…what Brown-Forman realized is that by taking their standard 72% corn, 18% rye, 10% malted barley bourbon and re-casking it into one of these brand-new casks for a little under a year, you restart the process and get a double dose of those “early” readily-available compounds into the whiskey. Further, by heavily toasting and lightly charring (instead of the usual heavy charring) the second barrel, you encourage a slightly different set of compounds to develop in the charred surface of the oak. Brilliant.
The Koval Millet whiskey is aged in 30-gallon new charred oak barrels (like bourbon distilleries, Koval sells all of its barrels after a single use). I was unable to find any information about the amount of time this whiskey spends in-barrel, so I would go ahead and assume it’s quite young. … Koval distillery in Chicago is an undeniable pioneer in this space, with various whiskies for sale distilled from millet, oats, spelt, wheat, and rye. All of Koval’s spirits are single-barrel releases, and all are made from organic grains farmed in the American Midwest.
I felt about the standard bottling that it could do with less watering-down, and along comes a Cask Strength sample for me to verify that assumption! Walsh releases a yearly bottling of the Writers’ Tears Cash Strength (around 2000 bottles a year) with a different label and packaging, and it does not appear to ever make it to the US market. The whiskey is aged in first-fill American oak and bottled without chill filtration. The 2014 edition is a respectable (but not extreme) 53% ABV.
Despite the “Powers” name, this release bears little resemblance to the bottom-shelf Powers blend, which is a typical Irish blended whiskey containing both pot-still whiskey and cheap grain whiskey. The John’s Lane bottling is 100% single (formerly “pure”) pot still Irish whiskey. … triple-distilled in copper pot stills by Midleton from a recipe of both malted and unmalted barley and aged for 12 years in ex-bourbon and sherry casks …
The Irishman is a brand of sourced Irish blended whiskey released by the very-much-not-a-distillery Walsh Whiskey Distillery Ltd., which also sells the very popular Writers’ Tears. Like Writers’ Tears, this is actually not a “blend” in the typical sense. It is a mixture of 70% single malt Irish whiskey with 30% single pot still Irish whiskey, with no column-still grain whiskey in sight.
