Tasting notes

nose

milk chocolate and roasted coffee over ripe plum, dark cherry and honey, with brown sugar and orange peel

palate

caramel and red berries with baking spice, dried red apple and a thread of caraway

finish

caramel and dark oak carry on with caraway and cinnamon, then roasted grain, with orange and baked apple lingering at the back

Mash bill

70% corn, 15% rye, 15% malted barley. The grain is local and non-GMO, with the corn grown on chief distiller Lee Kennedy's farm. The barley malt is toasted before it goes into the mash, which the distillery does for a deeper, more complex whiskey. The recipe keeps the same shares of corn and malt as the house's wheated bourbon, with rye in place of the wheat.

Why it's craft

This is the house's Tennessee whiskey: a rye recipe that is filtered through sugar-maple charcoal and bottled in bond at 100 proof without chill filtering. Leiper's Fork was founded in 2016 by Lee Kennedy, a seventh-generation Williamson County resident who spent three years getting county law changed so a distillery could open there. Every drop is mashed, fermented, distilled on a copper pot still, aged and bottled on the distillery's 27-acre property.