Tasting notes

nose

Candied apple and baked orchard fruit with pipe tobacco, oiled leather, clove and a touch of torched sugar

palate

Velvety; rich caramel and molasses with dark chocolate, cracked black pepper and spicy charred oak

finish

Long and silky; oak and cocoa nib linger, then a cool, earthy spearmint lifts the end

Mash bill

100% malted barley. Stranahan's distilled this whiskey from malted barley and Rocky Mountain water in a single distilling season, January to June 2015, as bonded rules require. Unlike most single malt, which ages in used casks, it spent its whole life in new American white oak with a level 3 char, the barrel bourbon uses, so the barley meets fresh wood throughout.

Why it's craft

This is Stranahan's first bottled-in-bond release and, the distillery says, the oldest bottled-in-bond whiskey ever released from Colorado. Bonded rules demand one distillery and one distilling season; Stranahan's ran this barley through its Denver stills between January and June 2015, then left it eleven years in a federally bonded warehouse in the same city. Denver's mile-high climate is part of the recipe: the distillery credits the altitude for how its whiskey matures over long aging. It was released for Colorado's 150th and the country's 250th anniversaries.