Tasting notes

nose

butterscotch and vanilla with honeyed baked apple, maraschino cherry, roasted chestnut and a cedary cigar-box edge

palate

toffee and toasted oak give way to baking spice, raisin, dried apricot and sweet mint, with a custardy richness and a faint rose note

finish

long; toasted oak and dark chocolate hold alongside peppery rye spice, slowly drying toward warm wood

Mash bill

100% Danko rye. WhistlePig grows the rye in its own fields in Shoreham, Vermont, and mashes it with no corn or malted barley alongside. The variety changes with the harvest: the first release in 2021 used Remington rye from the farm's North Orwell 1 field, and the 2023 release used Brasseto.

Why it's craft

Every step of this bottle happens on WhistlePig's farm in Shoreham: the rye is grown in its fields, distilled on the farm's pot stills, cut with its well water and aged in barrels coopered from oak cut on the property. That is the reverse of how WhistlePig began in 2010, bottling ten-year-old rye bought from Alberta; the farm only started distilling in 2015. Each bottle comes from one barrel and meets bottled-in-bond rules, so it is at least four years old and from a single distilling season.