Tasting notes

nose

Brown sugar, caramel and toffee, with honey graham cracker, nougat, vanilla and charred oak

palate

Honey and chocolate up front, then rye spice, mixed peppercorns and baking spice over leather and tannic oak, with a burnt-caramel edge

finish

Long and very dry; burnt caramel and leather fade with faint cinnamon and rye spice into dry oak

Mash bill

Corn, rye and malted barley, in proportions Peerless has not published. This is the distillery's standard bourbon recipe, the one used across its bourbon and barrel-finished bottlings; only the High Rye bourbon is made from a different mash. Like all Peerless whiskey it is sweet mash, cooked from fresh water and grain each batch.

Why it's craft

For this bottle Peerless takes five-year-old bourbon from its standard charred barrels and finishes it in medium-toast barrels from Kelvin Cooperage, a cooper that chars by hand with no added fuel. Head taster John Wadell says the medium toast was chosen because it carries fewer tannins, giving a more aromatic whiskey with strong vanilla. The bourbon underneath is made entirely in the downtown Louisville distillery, from a sweet-mash cook to double distillation on a Vendome copper still, by the family descended from Henry Kraver, who ran Kentucky Peerless in Henderson from 1889.