Tasting notes

nose

Maple and brown sugar over toasted oak, with caramel, vanilla, green apple and a thread of dark chocolate

palate

Thick and oily; baked apple glazed in brown sugar, then dry, peppery rye, earthy baking spice and a squeeze of citrus, turning to cocoa and charred oak

finish

Long; a flash of baking spice and pepper gives way to dark chocolate and a little red fruit, drying to herbal charred oak and earthy rye

Mash bill

At least 51% rye; Peerless does not publish the rest of the recipe. The mash is strictly sweet: every batch is cooked from fresh water and fresh grain, rather than the sour-mash method of adding back spent mash from the previous run. The grain is milled and cooked in the distillery's own 2,500-gallon cooker in Louisville.

Why it's craft

This is the house rye of Kentucky Peerless, made start to finish in one downtown Louisville building: the grain is milled, cooked, fermented, double-distilled on a copper column still built by Vendome, barreled and bottled under one roof. Every batch is sweet mash and every bottle goes out at barrel proof, so the strength on the label moves with the batch. The distillery runs under DSP-KY-50, the permit number of the original Kentucky Peerless that Henry Kraver ran in Henderson from 1889 until wartime grain rules and Prohibition shut it in 1917; his great-grandson Corky Taylor and Corky's son Carson revived it.