Tasting notes

nose

papaya and orange marmalade over demerara sugar, with black currant, apricot, sweet cream, brown bread and a dusting of cinnamon

palate

Bing cherry and ripe mango up front, then cream, toasted bread, plantain and a root-beer note of sassafras

finish

long and coating; plantain and campfire wood stay, rounding off into black pepper and sassafras spice

Mash bill

100% malted two-row barley. The barley is grown near the distillery and malted at Riverbend Malt House in Asheville, so the whole recipe comes from western North Carolina. The local pale malt gives a bready, orchard-fruit base for the rum cask to build on.

Awards

• Gold — Beverage Testing Institute 2026

Why it's craft

Oak & Grist is an independent distillery outside Asheville that brews, ferments, distills and ages its whiskey in-house from barley grown and malted within about 60 miles. This bottling moves from its first barrel into a Caribbean rum cask for roughly two and a half years, long enough for the cask to reshape the malt rather than season it. It comes out as numbered single-barrel batches rather than a standing blended release.