Tasting notes

nose

butterscotch, almond and milk chocolate, then candied apricot, orange marmalade and honeyed oats over a musty, earthy edge

palate

oily and coating; honey, brown sugar and chewy caramel with graham cracker and orange jam, lifted by rye spice and white pepper

finish

long; black pepper and rye spice linger over bitter chocolate, tobacco leaf and leather, drying to charred oak with a last trace of brown sugar

Mash bill

65% corn, 20% floor-malted barley, 15% rye. Leopold Bros malts the barley itself on its own malting floor in Denver, and at a fifth of the recipe that malt gives the bourbon a grainy, biscuity backbone under the corn. The mash ferments for seven days in open cypress vats with a mix of whiskey and beer yeasts before it goes to the still.

Why it's craft

When it came out this was the oldest bourbon Leopold Bros had released, and Todd Leopold finished it in casks just emptied of the distillery's own Three Chamber rye, so the oily rye left in the wood carries into the bourbon. Leopold Bros is a family distillery founded in 1999 by brothers Scott and Todd Leopold, and in Denver it floor-malts its barley, then mashes, ferments, pot-distills and ages the whiskey on site. It fills its barrels at 100 proof rather than 125, and the earthen-floor warehouse let this bourbon gain strength on its own over eight years.