Tasting notes

nose

sweet grain and toasted oak with apple, cherry candy, cinnamon and toffee, and a sharp note of pine and eucalyptus

palate

dry and chewy, with cinnamon, apple and pear, caramel, vanilla, nougat and almond, toasted grain and a hint of clove and anise

finish

long and spicy; caramel, vanilla and nutty nougat hold, then dried fruit and a coppery, metallic edge as it fades

Mash bill

54% corn, 23% rye, 23% malted barley. Tom's Foolery adjusts that split slightly from batch to batch. The distillery grows its own corn and rye on its 115-acre farm in Burton, Ohio, rotating them with beans, and makes the whiskey as a sour mash, carrying part of each run into the next.

Why it's craft

Tom's Foolery grows its corn and rye on its own farm in Burton, Ohio, and mashes, ferments, distills and ages the whiskey there. Tom Herbruck filled his first barrel in 2011 on the historic pot stills from the shuttered Michter's distillery in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, and ran them until selling them to the new Michter's in 2015. Its beer still, at more than 1,200 gallons, is the largest pot still in Ohio. The barrels age in an unheated rackhouse, and each bonded batch is five hand-picked barrels.