Tasting notes

nose

campfire smoke and smoldering wood over brown sugar, vanilla and cocoa, with masa, dried apple and a green, wintergreen-like herbal edge

palate

a rush of sweetness turns quickly to heavy smoke, with roasted corn, char, caramel, cocoa, roasted nuts, a streak of blackberry and a savory, grilled-meat note

finish

very long; smoke, chocolate and vanilla hold on, then it turns ashy and tarry, with a touch of orange at the end

Mash bill

100% roasted blue corn. Balcones began with Hopi blue corn from New Mexico and now uses a hybrid blue corn grown for it by Sunny State Farm in the Texas Panhandle, which costs it roughly twice what yellow dent corn does. The corn is roasted and mashed with no rye, wheat or barley, the same grain as Balcones' Baby Blue. Balcones chose blue corn to show off a heritage grain that may never have been made into whiskey before; Brimstone's smoke comes later, from wood, not from the grain.

Why it's craft

Balcones was founded in Waco in 2008 and began distilling in 2009 in an old welding shop under a bridge, and its Baby Blue was the first Texas whisky on the market after Prohibition. It makes its whisky grain to glass on copper pot stills built by Forsyths in Scotland. Smoky whiskies nearly always take their smoke from grain dried over a fire before mashing; Brimstone is smoked after distillation, with sun-baked Texas scrub oak, so the smoke is oak, not peat. Diageo has owned Balcones since 2022.