Tasting notes

nose

sweet hickory smoke and popcorn, with toasted marshmallow and lemon peel

palate

grilled corn on the cob and caramel, then dark-roast coffee and cinnamon

finish

sweet and briny at first, with tobacco and chipotle heat, settling into buttered bread

Mash bill

100% heirloom yellow corn, a tenth of it cold-smoked over hickory. The Ute Mountain Tribe grows the corn for Deerhammer at 6,000 feet in southwest Colorado, from a variety cultivated to thrive in that region's harsh climate. Before mashing, 10% of the corn spends 24 hours in a custom-built cold smoker over smoldering hickory, and the grain is then made into a sour mash.

Why it's craft

Deerhammer cold-smokes part of the corn for this whiskey over hickory in a smoker built for the job, and the corn is an heirloom yellow variety grown for the distillery by the Ute Mountain Tribe. The distillery mashes, ferments and double distills it on squat-head copper pot stills in Buena Vista, Colorado. As a corn whiskey it must age in used oak, not the new charred oak most American whiskey starts in, so it rests in Deerhammer's own used bourbon barrels at 8,000 feet. Amy and Lenny Eckstein founded the distillery in 2010, and it remains independent.