Tasting notes

nose

Oatmeal-raisin cookie and vanilla icing, with baked peach, candied pear, orange zest, a hint of lilac and soft cinnamon

palate

Almond pastry, butterscotch and coconut macaroon, then baking chocolate, dried cranberry and clove with a light floral note

finish

Long and warm; raw brown sugar and roasted walnut first, settling into leather and buttery, custardy toast

Mash bill

73% white corn, 10% winter wheat, 17% malted barley. The white corn is non-GMO and grown locally, and wheat takes the place that rye holds in Castle & Key's traditional bourbon recipe, trading peppery spice for a softer, rounder sweetness. This is the same wheated recipe as the distillery's five-year Small Batch Wheated, given two more years in the barrel.

Why it's craft

Castle & Key makes its whiskey on the grounds of the Old Taylor Distillery, which Colonel E.H. Taylor Jr. built in 1887 and which sat abandoned for decades before Will Arvin and Wes Murry bought it in 2014 and spent four years restoring it. This release is the distillery's wheated recipe at seven years old, bottled at the strength it came out of the barrel, barely above the 107 proof it went in at. Everything in the bottle was distilled, aged and bottled on that site.