Tasting notes

nose

chocolate orange, plum and cherry cola, with raspberry, blackberry and maraschino cherry

palate

vanilla and blackberry jam over cherry strudel, rhubarb and elderberry, with coffee and blood orange

finish

long; ripe berries, plum, fig and stone fruit, drying to tobacco leaf and oak with a pop of black pepper

Mash bill

75% corn, 21% rye, 4% malted barley. That was the recipe of the bought-in bourbons blended for batch 12, which were three-year Indiana and four-year Texas whiskeys; Hinterhaus has not published the grain bill of each later batch.

Why it's craft

Hinterhaus does not distill this bourbon: it buys straight bourbons, ages them further at its distillery 4,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada, and finishes them in barrels from wineries in its own Calaveras County. The red-fleshed Alicante Bouschet grape used for batch 12 is why the whiskey comes out a deep mahogany-red, and the label states that no color is added. Nate and Bonnie Randall, a husband and wife, run the distillery, which numbers each batch so drinkers can compare one with the next.