Tasting notes

nose

Grilled peach, brown sugar and fig over sweet corn oil, with raspberry and dark chocolate, a little bubble gum, a faint mint and light oak

palate

Thin and oily; white pepper, corn syrup and orange rind, then yellow cake, tangerine and tart cherry with chalky vanilla, over a sharp, tannic oak

finish

Short; a quick hit of corn syrup, then white pepper and oak with a dab of vanilla, fading to oak and pepper

Mash bill

100% Jimmy Red corn, sweet mash. The corn comes from Turnbridge Farm in Darlington, South Carolina, one of the farms High Wire has worked with to bring this red James Island landrace back from near extinction. No malted grain goes into the mash, so the whole recipe is one unmalted heirloom corn.

Why it's craft

High Wire calls this one of the few single-farm, single-grain bourbons made since Prohibition: all of its corn is Jimmy Red from one South Carolina farm, aged at least four years and bottled at 100 proof under the bonded rules. A bourbon with no malted grain at all is rare, and this one is entirely unmalted Jimmy Red. The distillery, founded in Charleston in 2013 by Scott Blackwell and Ann Marshall, helped revive the corn from two surviving ears and does its own milling, mashing, distilling and aging downtown.