Tasting notes

nose

roasted, buttery corn and candy corn with biscuit, dried apricot, pear, maple, vanilla and a floral lift

palate

charred corn and vanilla custard, then honeyed citrus, stone fruit, cinnamon and allspice, coffee bean and dried cherry, with an herbal thread and firm tannin

finish

mellows and turns creamy, then dries; dried cherry takes on a sherried edge before cocoa bitterness and oak tannin close it

Mash bill

100% roasted blue corn. It is the same mash as Balcones' Baby Blue, from corn grown in Texas: 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, at roughly twice the cost of yellow dent corn. The corn is roasted and mashed with no other grain. Balcones set out to make a blue corn whisky rather than a bourbon, to show off a heritage grain that may never have been made into whiskey before.

Awards

• World's Best Corn Whisky — World Whiskies Awards 2018

Why it's craft

Balcones opened in Waco in 2008 and its first release, Baby Blue, was the first Texas whisky on the market after Prohibition; True Blue 100 is that same blue-corn spirit given more time in wood. As a straight corn whisky it ages in used oak rather than the new charred barrels bourbon must use, and the longer stay is meant to balance the roasted corn with the oak. Balcones distills grain to glass on copper pot stills built by Forsyths in Scotland. Diageo has owned the distillery since 2022.