Tasting notes

nose

Raspberry and shortbread cookie up front, with roasted nuts, coffee bean, black tea leaf, a light grape-juice note and soft leather

palate

Silky and creamy, with strawberry, chocolate and vanilla, deepening toward a coffee-and-cocoa dessert richness

finish

Medium-long and creamy, with dulce de leche, caramel and vanilla waffle cone lingering beside a chocolate-covered pretzel note, then it lightens and dries into lightly charred oak

Mash bill

51% corn, 39% wheat, 10% malted barley. All three grains are grown in Montana, and the wheat comes from the Montgomery family farm near Heath, in the center of the state, where a spring creek irrigates the fields. Wheat takes the place rye usually fills in a bourbon mash, and at 39% it gives a sweet, mellow whiskey.

Awards

• Gold — Beverage Testing Institute (Tastings.com) 2023

Why it's craft

This wheated bourbon is fermented, distilled and aged in Missoula from Montana-grown corn, wheat and malted barley, with the wheat raised on the Montgomery family's own farm near Heath. Montgomery Distillery is a family-owned producer that opened in 2012 as Missoula's first craft distillery and mills, ferments and distills its own grain on a single combination pot-column still. The same four-year-old whiskey is the base of the distillery's bourbon amaro, B'Amaro.