Tasting notes

nose

Pine sap and fresh-baked rye bread over vanilla, cinnamon and charred oak, with stewed cherry and brown sugar underneath

palate

Thick and syrupy; brown sugar and maple give way to lychee, citrus peel and a wave of peppery rye, with dark chocolate, leather and sawdust behind

finish

Medium in length; rye spice, maple and pine sap hold first, fading to cherry, then drying to citrus peel and tannic oak

Mash bill

61% malted rye, 39% corn. This is the rye-malt recipe 291 built its name on: the rye is malted rather than used raw, and the grain comes from the Colorado plains. The mash is soured in open-air fermenters, and a share of the stillage from each run goes into the next batch, a step the distillery calls the El Paso County Process.

Awards

• World's Best Rye — World Whiskies Awards 2018

Why it's craft

Distillery 291 makes its rye from scratch in Colorado Springs: it mills and cooks the grain, sours the mash in open-air fermenters and runs it three times through copper pot stills. Founder Michael Myers, a former New York fashion photographer, built his first still from the copper photogravure plates he once printed with, and pulled his first whiskey off it on September 11, 2011. Every 291 whiskey ends on toasted staves of aspen harvested near the distillery, and each bottle is filled, corked and labeled by hand.