Tasting notes

nose

toasted sourdough and fresh butter, peanut shell, maple syrup, cocoa nib and hazelnut, opening to plum, apricot, cherry and orange marmalade

palate

viscous and chewy; honey, dark caramel, vanilla and coffee, with red apple, stone fruit and buttered rye toast under concentrated rye spice

finish

long; seasoned oak, dried fruit and spice hold on, then fade to chamomile, rose and lavender

Mash bill

80% Abruzzi rye, 20% floor-malted barley. Abruzzi is a heritage rye variety that pre-Prohibition distillers favored, and Leopold Bros grew it to bring the grain back into American whiskey. The barley is malted on the distillery's own floor in Denver, and there is no corn in the mash, so the rye carries the whiskey. The mash ferments for seven days in open-top cypress vats with a specialty ale yeast.

Why it's craft

The Three Chamber still made oily, heavily flavored whiskey for distillers such as Jack Daniel's and Stitzel-Weller, fell out of use after Prohibition because it was inefficient, and had vanished entirely by the 1960s. Todd Leopold had Vendome in Kentucky build one from old manuscripts, the first seen in the US in more than five decades, and this nine-year release is the oldest and strongest rye the distillery has drawn from it. Leopold Bros, the Denver family distillery Scott and Todd Leopold founded in 1999, grew the Abruzzi rye for it and malts its own barley.