Tasting notes

nose

Seasoned oak and orange zest, with dark caramel, graham cracker and rye spice

palate

Dense and oily; warm molasses and earthy cinnamon give way to floral notes, smoky herbs, dark chocolate and toasted oak

finish

Long; candied smoke and dark chocolate hold on with black pepper and rye spice, and a cool mint note arrives late

Mash bill

At least 51% rye, the legal floor for a straight rye; Peerless keeps the other grains and their proportions private. The whiskey is the distillery's own sweet-mash rye, cooked from fresh water and grain in every batch, before it goes on to a second barrel.

Why it's craft

Peerless puts its own straight rye through a second new oak barrel, so the whiskey takes a full extraction from fresh wood twice, and the tasters choose which barrels earn the second fill. Everything before that happens in the same Louisville building, from a sweet-mash cook to double distillation on a 26-foot copper column still made by Vendome, a still maker whose founder opened the business partly on his fee for dismantling Henry Kraver's shuttered Peerless distillery. Kraver's descendants, the Taylor family, rebuilt the distillery and bottle all of it at barrel proof.