Tasting notes

nose

tart cherry and cracked black pepper over cut grass and hay, with honey, baked bread and a faint lemon edge

palate

dry and spicy on a light body; rye bread, honey and apricot, then pear, apple and a trace of butterscotch under oak

finish

medium to fairly long; pepper and rye spice tingle with lemon peel and oak, fading dry with a light bitter edge

Mash bill

100% organic rye. The rye comes from a single crop grown in Maine and is milled at the distillery, which takes all its grain from farms within about 150 miles. The mash is made in the sour mash style, with part of a previous batch used to start the next fermentation.

Why it's craft

Chocorua is distilled from one crop of organic Maine rye that Tamworth mills itself and ferments as a sour mash, with no corn or barley in the recipe. The distillery, founded in 2015 in a White Mountains village, runs a single 250-gallon copper still and rests its whiskey in a barrel house built from local timber. One dollar from every bottle goes to the Chocorua Lake Conservancy, which protects the mountain and lake the whiskey is named for.