Brother Justus
By Meghan Swanson
Of the many official and professional titles Phil Steger has held over his widely varied and impressive career, ‘teacher’ is not one. After hearing his personal history and the history of his distillery, Brother Justus Whiskey Company, we here at American Mash & Grain think it should be added to the list. Phil loves people–he is the kind of person who probably knows the name of the person that cleans his office and genuinely wants to know how his server’s day is going when he dines out–but more than that, he demonstrates a deep and abiding love for humanity. Many folks get into making whiskey because of a passion for the drink or a desire to showcase what can be done with their favorite grain, or to have a career where they get to use their hands and make a tangible product that can be shared with their friends and family. For some it’s a second career, for others a primary calling; for Phil, whiskey fits neatly into the recurring, driving pattern of his life’s work: to preserve, disseminate, and celebrate knowledge for the benefit of all humankind, and live his best and biggest possible life doing it.
“I’m a bit of a seeker and dreamer, someone who has always tried to put my vision into some sort of concrete action in life.”
Phil grew up in southwestern Minnesota on the endless prairies of the midwestern United States. “It was vast…when I would be on my back deck, I could feel that landscape stretching all the way to the Rockies,” he describes. He fell in love with the enormous scale of the prairie, and never forgot it even when he migrated in his senior year of high school to Manchester, England. Afterward, he attended St. John’s University, an all-male Benedictine college in central Minnesota. While there, he took a year off and lived off the grid in a cabin in the boreal forest even further north, above Lake Superior.
It was at St. John’s where Phil, a young man from the prairie, got to know Minnesota’s hardwood forests. “I got a feeling and a sense for the woods, and particularly of the white oak forest,” he recalls. During his time living off the grid further north, he got to know the boreal forest too. “Minnesota is the only place where the Great Plains, the Eastern hardwood forest, and the boreal forest meet.” he points out. “Even though this may not be the heart of the economy or the culture or anything else like that, I’m connected here in Minnesota to the whole continent, to the whole country, through the land.” he explains.
After college, Phil lived in a home with people who were experiencing homelessness for two years, serving them through what he describes as a deeply-rooted hospitality model, rather than a social service model. “The biggest feeling of poverty is loneliness,” he explains.
As the Iraq War broke out in 2003, Phil started helping to provide humanitarian aid to the people caught in the conflict. The job wasn’t as simple as donating, however; he helped gather medical supplies, flew to Amman–the capital of neighboring Jordan–and hired a driver to get him and the smuggled supplies across the desert to Baghdad, where they were distributed by private, non-governmental groups to those who needed them most. “That was a really profound experience,” he relates. “You go from America to Iraq, which is the birthplace of civilization–the earliest written civilizations, the earliest agriculture, the earliest beer that was ever brewed,” he points out. “That gave me a sense of telescoping time. The world is big horizontally, and it’s really big vertically, in terms of going deep down into the past.” he explains.
“I was trying to imagine what I would do after what was, a pretty incredible job - getting to be a digital Indiana Jones and working with people of incredible ingenuity and profound learning and education.”
Where does Phil’s deeply impactful journey of service to other human beings take him out of a 4x4 vehicle in the desert and into his own distillery? For a little while at least, back into the desert - and the mountains, valleys, and cities of Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Ukraine. In 2007, one of the monks he studied with at St. John’s wanted to establish manuscript preservation studios in all of these places threatened by war, and Phil had a unique blend of skills and experiences that made him nearly the only man he knew for the job. “He said, ‘You know what? We’re not in a position to save lives, but there are manuscripts that tell the stories of the communities…that go back centuries. And they’re not as valuable as human life, but they are just as irreplaceable.’” Phil recalls the monk explaining. “They’re the kind of books that create identity and create peoplehood and create a sense of belonging, even when bad things happen.” Phil says.
Phil committed to the project and spent the next two years building relationships with local people to facilitate the digital preservation of these stories. It was on a break, near the end of this mission, that Phil began to think of what would be next for him. He returned to the U.S. and took a breather; he and his wife traveled to a monastery near Louisville, Kentucky. As they were leaving, they saw a sign for a well-known bourbon distillery down the road. “I was like, ‘Let’s check it out’,” he recalls.
That spur-of-the-moment decision would change Phil’s life trajectory. “While we were checking it out and I was getting the tour, it was a flash, it was like the road to Damascus,” he recalls, referencing the biblical tale of the conversion of the Apostle Paul, in which Paul is blinded and then subsequently re-gifted with sight. The tour guide was describing the production of whiskey in a particular way that fired Phil’s imagination. “They’re describing whiskey as grain soaked in water, and then fermenting that liquid - I was like, okay, water, grain; that’s beer,” Phil recalls. His mind flew to his home state of Minnesota, birthplace of the Mississippi river, where the headwaters churned and flowed over hundreds of miles of limestone bedrock and the rich, black topsoil stood 18 feet deep. He knew that Minnesota has the largest barley malt house in the northern hemisphere. “Most of the beer that’s made in America,” he explains, “gets some amount of malt from right here in Minnesota.” His home state, with its unique geographical makeup, was ripe for representation in the world of whiskey. “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell the story of Minnesota.” he resolved.
“I realized this might well be my manuscript. This–this is what I’m going to contribute to world culture.”
Shortly after that, around 2009, Phil went to study the craft whiskey market and regulations and immediately realized something. “Oh, this world is not made for a small craft distillery,” he recalls thinking. At the time in Minnesota, the annual licensing fee for a distillery of any size–even if that distillery was producing as little as one gallon per year–was $30,000. “What’s the point of that?” Phil asks. “If you make a three or four year old whiskey, that’s $90,000 to $120,000 in licensing fees.” The most nonsensical part of this arrangement was that the licensing fees would be due before the prospective distiller ever even fired up their still, as Phil put it, ‘just to see if you know what you’re doing’. It was in 2009 that he and his spouse welcomed their first child, which drove home Phil’s concerns about whiskey as a way to make a living. “I thought…if this whiskey thing never works–and it seemed super unlikely at the time—if I have got to make a living through a labor hour, I should do a labor hour that you know, will make me a living,” he explains. He decided on a new career in law. “It’s a super flexible degree in terms of being able to just pay the bills,” he tells us. It also might still benefit his distillery dreams. “Given how regulated whiskey is, [a law degree] could help me solve my own problems instead of having to pay somebody else to do it.”
While Phil was in law school, Minnesota changed the law and created a microdistillery category that lowered the annual licensing fee. Phil continued with his degree and secured a clerkship with the U.S. Court of Appeals. To the endless amusement of his judge, he formally incorporated his distillery in 2013, just one year out of law school. At the time, any hopeful craft distiller was subject to various state and federal permits and licenses with successive waiting periods that added up. Phil had bought his first still, secured the rest of his equipment, and signed the lease on a small basement space. All of it sat for 14 to 16 months while he awaited his licenses and permits. “At least it was only one grand instead of thirty K,” he points out. Had he been tempted to tinker with his new still and equipment during the waiting period? “Honest to God, I just did a law degree and worked for a federal judge,” he says. “I’d seen the FBI at work, and I never want an FBI agent to approach me and say they need to talk to me about anything.” he stresses. “If I weren’t starting a distillery, it might have been different–but I didn’t want to ever be looking over my shoulder wondering if somebody was going to discover something that could take it all away. I needed to be able to be one hundred percent oriented towards the future,” he finishes. He knew it was going to be tough, but he felt if he could just get through those months he would never have to look backward again.
In time all of the applications were approved, and Brother Justus Whiskey Company began operations; they rented space in the basement of a warehouse that held another distillery. Their space was around 1200 square feet and below the street, with their only natural light source a bank of greasy, smeared windows at what Phil calls ‘shoelace level’. There was no HVAC system, and their first equipment was a 26 gallon ‘milk can’ still with an electric heating coil bought from ‘a hillbilly in Kentucky’. “And that’s how we started,” Phil says with a smile.
“Francis was one of those guys; he either dropped pearls of wisdom or clods of B.S., and you never knew which it was until you put your hand in it.”
But where did the name Brother Justus come from? “Go back with me to late 1997,” Phil implores, “it’s the summer after I graduated, up in St. John’s in the Avon Hills of central Minnesota.” He had become friends with a local old-timer, Francis Schellinger, a “fairy-tale woodsman who went into the woods on his land and cut down trees, milled those trees into lumber, and turned that lumber into beautiful furniture, boats, homes, whatever people paid him to do.” Phil describes. “That was how he made his living.” One summer day Phil was working for Francis, helping him stack some freshly-sawn boards to air, and Francis lifted his head and sniffed the wind. “‘Huh, I smell smoke, no plume. Somebody’s hiding their plume,’”, Phil recalls Francis saying. “‘I bet my neighbors are cooking moon.’” Francis pronounced. Phil was skeptical - he had never heard of moonshining in Minnesota. Francis looked at Phil “like I’m an idiot,” Phil recalls. “He’s just like, ‘Okay, go on, believe that then. But I guarantee you in the ‘20s and ‘30s, every farm in this county had a moonshine still,’” Phil remembers. Francis said it was how they had gotten through the Great Depression and Prohibition, which he called the ‘Farm Depression’, reflecting Prohibition’s effect on grain sales in the 1920s.
It wasn't until 2015 that Phil would connect Francis’ statement that clear summer day in 1997 with his mission to showcase Minnesota through whiskey. He and his spouse had just welcomed their second child. “We had our very first date where we got to leave the kids with my parents, stay in a hotel in downtown Minneapolis–a fancy place–and go see a show,” Phil recalls. While he waited for his wife to get ready for their evening out, he passed the time by reading a magazine. Suddenly, he spotted a book review of “Minnesota 13: ‘Wet’ Wild Prohibition Days by Elaine Davis. Perhaps Francis was right about the hidden plume, the prohibition distilling, all of it. “I said, ‘Honey, I’ll be back!’” Phil tells us. “She’s like, ‘We’re going to the show!’ ‘I promise I’ll be back,’” he replied. “I caught the elevator downstairs, ran two blocks to the Barnes & Noble downtown, ran to the Food & Beverage section…on the very bottom shelf was this skinny little paperback,” he says. Inside, everything Francis said was borne out.
“1200 families, 1200 whiskey distilleries in Minnesota in one county,” Phil tells us. The monks of St. John’s Abbey were supporting these endeavors. “The priests, they were hiding whiskey for people. They were sending the Feds the wrong way, they were blessing stills,” he recounts. The prevailing opinion among the brothers of the time seems to have been that while whiskey was illegal, it wasn’t necessarily immoral. “They were saying, ‘Hey, you’re just trying to support your family,” Phil explains. In the book, he came across a photo of a blacksmith monk posing at the anvil, hammer raised with an impish smirk on his face. “And it says, ‘Brother Justus Trettel’,” Phil recalls. William Trettel, a Polish tinsmith known at the monastery as ‘Brother Justus’, saw moonshining as a way for farm families to make much-needed money during tough economic times. “He knew they needed help because they didn’t know how to make it,” Phil says. “He taught them how to make good, clean whiskey. And I read that, and I thought–there it is. This is the story I’m meant to tell.”
“I’m not making whiskey to federal standards, state standards, Kentucky standards, Tennessee standards or Scottish standards - I’m making whiskey to Brother Justus standards. That drives me to take the long way, try the hard way, and make something I think I can really be proud of.”
Phil’s guiding philosophy from the outset didn’t really include making American whiskey according to the accepted tradition and legal definition. As he took in the tour that spurred his road-to-Damascus moment, he listened to the guide explaining the distillation process and the mash bill required to make bourbon. He instantly understood that to make whiskey, one had to brew beer first; what he didn’t understand was making it from corn. “We’re talking about modern corn, which is hybridized to be a sugar pouch,” he points out. “Without knowing anything else, I thought, ‘Well, if I’m going to make whiskey, I’m not going to make it from corn beer. I’m going to make it from barley beer,’” he recalls. “Barley can give you the crisp minerality of a pilsner, the buttery sweetness of a lager, the cookie and cake-like toasted sweetness of a pale ale, the banana bread of a Belgian ale…barley, yeast, and water can give you all those flavors.” he concluded.
Soon after Brother Justus Whiskey Company opened its doors, Phil brought on James Jefferson; now Master Blender, James started out as a brewer. “I have done all these other things in my life, and I wouldn’t trade it, but it’s arrogant to think that I can learn what another adult human spent their time learning to master, right?” Phil asks. “I was like, ‘I gotta find the person who has spent their time mastering that, and then make this a business they want to be a part of and build with me and go forward. James was that guy,” he explains. With James’ experience and knowledge in his arsenal, Phil knew where he wanted to start. “Our philosophy here at Brother Justus is that it is the fermentation that actually creates the potential flavor and future of a whiskey,” he tells us. “Whiskey is distilled beer; distillation is editing. The real creative work is in fermentation. It’s our job to make that as full of complementary and interesting and compatible and exciting flavors and textures as possible. Then it’s the distiller’s job to bring in the clean knife and cut and get the cuts of everything that’s choice out of that distillate and into the new make.” he asserts.
Phil’s passion for barley in particular and his people-first focus have left him something of a unique player on the craft distillery field. “I started this really organically; I started Brother Justus to make sure you heard the story. I wasn’t trying to chase a trend or get ahead of a curve or anticipate anything,” he says. “I don’t want to make an American version of a Scotch or Irish whiskey—not because I don’t love those, I do–but because that’s not the country I live in, that’s not the land I live on, that’s not the history I’m part of,” he explains. When he started making his whiskey with barley, eschewing the more typical American corn and rye distillations, he called it single malt American whiskey.
It wasn’t until much later he found out about the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission and the attempt to legally standardize the definition of American single malt with the TTB. The trouble is, the way Brother Justus had developed their process is incompatible with the proposed definition, which has a distillation proof cap of 160. “There’s no such thing as over-proofed. There’s only under-flavored,” Phil asserts. He says ethanol cannot be oversaturated with flavor. “If there’s a high-proof whiskey that tastes hot, in my view it’s just because they haven’t put enough meat on its bones.” he reasons. He sees the proof limit as a result of corn- and rye-centric American distilling traditions. “They don’t have the same complexity [as barley traditions]. Doing a rougher, lower-proof cut is good because you’re getting some cuts in there that add complexity, over time, in the barrel,” he explains. “But that is an adaptation to the limits of the grain,” he adds, “Nothing inherent to whiskey, this product or this process.” He would have liked to become a member of the commission, but ultimately couldn’t agree to the 160 proof cap. “Why voluntarily impose a limit on your creative possibilities? I can’t resign myself to it. I want people to make whiskey the way they think they should make whiskey and let me make whiskey the way I think we should make whiskey, especially malt, and then let consumers decide what they like. And they will.” he finishes.
“Peat bogs are the most mysterious of all landscapes, except maybe the bottom of the ocean. Human beings live everywhere on earth except for peat bogs and Antarctica–and we even live in Antarctica.”
On that distillery tour that sparked his dream, Phil could instantly think of Minnesotan sources for water, barley, and oak; the one thing he was told American whiskey didn’t have was peat. “Minnesota has 6 million acres of peat bog,” he thought. “I want to be the one to make the first whiskey with peat in America, from American-sourced peat,” he resolved. But how to get the peat out of the bog? It would have to be cut, hauled away, dried, and burned; a process that didn’t already exist as part of his malt house’s operations and one that would also destroy the bog over time. “Our bogs are 8,000 years old. They were formed when the glaciers melted,” Phil tells us. The same process formed the great lakes; but wherever a nice ‘bowl’ wasn’t readily available to form a lake, the glacier-melt simply waterlogged the land, resulting in soil with nearly zero oxygen content. “It’s this incredible paradox that we call them ‘rotting’ bogs,” Phil points out, “But actually bogs are the only place where nothing rots, nothing [biologically] decomposes.” he explains. “I started to imagine rolling time back and then rolling the camera forward at the time of the melting of the glaciers, and realizing that, for 100,000 years or more, there was nothing green in much of Minnesota. It was just white and blue,” he says. “Then there was the first little grass or reed that grew—the first green thing in this land in 100,00 years. That one green plant, that first green plant, is still in the bog,” Phil posits. “And I thought, ‘I can’t dig that up and set that on fire.’”
Burning the bog was out; but Phil still wanted to know - what did that 8,000 year old plant taste like? How could he get that essential peat bog flavor into his whiskey? He started calling every peat producer in Minnesota, introducing himself as a ‘startup manufacturer’ who wanted to develop an industrial use for peat and wanted to source from a Minnesotan supplier. Almost all of the samples weren’t something Phil could do anything with, except for one–a peat product from American Peat Technology based in Aitkin County. “Aitkin County is one-third peat bog,” Phil reveals. “It is an ecologically incredibly useful environment, but it is not an exploitable land for humans,” he explains. By warming peat up and subjecting it to pressure, American Peat Technology took their peat from a spongy substance to something small and granular, like a grit or coffee ground. “‘Oh, we can replace the Lincoln County process!’” Phil thought. Instead of using charcoal, they would use this similarly-textured peat product. “Effectively, what we do is filter the whiskey through the peat. The peat does subtractive maturation that would take years in a barrel,” Phil explains. “But then it does a little bit of additive maturation by infusing the whiskey with these 8,000 year old botanicals,” he tells us. This is how Brother Justus makes its one-of-a-kind ‘Cold-PeatedⓇ’ American single malt.
Phil had everything, now - an expert brewer by his side, the finest Minnesota waters, barley, oak, and even a sustainable source for Minnesota peat. Brother Justus was humming along in their small basement space with its street-level, grime-streaked windows. “We did 1,000 fermentations, 400 distillations, and 400 test barrels in the basement,” Phil recalls. They did one small scale-up in the basement, switching from their 26-gallon electric still to a 100-gallon copper steam jacketed still. They laid up as much whiskey as they could, preparing to jump to a large distillery space. For those first few years, Phil was living two lives, splitting his time between the basement distillery and the law firm. In 2019, he left his law career to raise money to build a new facility for Brother Justus. “Everything was timed out–we had the liquid. We had it all,” Phil remembers, “And then March 2020 came.” The call came from the still supplier; Phil’s new still order had to be pushed back 90 days. And then another call; another 90 days. A third call and another 90 days, and on and on. “Not the worst thing that happened in the pandemic by any stretch. There’s no equivalency to the things that people suffered,” Phil concedes. “But from the perspective of the business, we saw everything fall apart.”
Stuck with his old equipment still in the small basement distillery and a new but empty space awaiting back-ordered new equipment, Phil applied to open a cocktail room. They had the whiskey supply, after all, and it would help them stay afloat. The state may have taken a different view; using a very restrictive interpretation of the law in the off chance that Brother Justus wasn’t moving their entire operation but potentially trying to open a second distillery under the guise of a cocktail room, they refused the request. “We had to shut down the little distillery, move all the equipment over here [to the new location], and set up a Potemkin distillery,” Phil recalls. Unable to hook up their new equipment and run a true distillery again until it arrived, they ran the cocktail room alone while they waited. As their reputation grew but their finite supply of whiskey dwindled, Phil fielded frustrating calls from retailers asking him how they could get his product on their shelves; without any new supply being laid down, he had to be miserly with what they had. “We got through it, and eventually we got all our new equipment, but not until April 2021,” he explains. “We got it hooked up and we’ve been distilling ever since.”
“The most beautiful places that people preserve and hold on to across centuries are the ones that make them feel good, that make them feel uplifted…and what does whiskey do if not give you an immediate lift of the soul on the palate?”
In what was perhaps a natural move for someone who spent time among a monastic order, Phil gave careful consideration to the physical spaces of Brother Justus Whiskey Company as well as the aesthetic of its product labels in a way that takes into account the inner experience of its patrons. “Whiskey itself is a distillation of life, right?” he asks. “You’re taking a landscape, you’re taking time, you’re taking history…you’re taking that and you’re creating something through distillation. And that’s why whiskey, to me, is different from everything else.” he says. “You’re taking all that and you’re trying to put it into an ounce that can fit in your glass, but when that touches your palate…suddenly that whole landscape unfolds.” he describes. “My favorite book as a kid was a pop-up book; you open it, and holy crap, this castle comes out–a whole world emerges,” he recalls. “That’s what I’m trying to do with the whiskey.”
Phil wants to live his one life in the largest and most vivid way, and he wants that for everyone else, too. “If I can help somebody else see how incredibly beautiful the world can be, even if it’s in a hard time–maybe especially if it’s a hard time–not in a way that…minimizes what they’re going through, but that says ‘Hey, you’re attached to something bigger.’ That’s hugely motivating for me,” he shares. “I really have the sense that every human being is so much more than whatever you might want to reduce them to.” he says. This philosophy is borne out by the sense of beauty, order, and simplicity in Brother Justus’ public and private spaces. “Our team finds that if you have a beautiful distillery, you make beautiful whiskey.” Phil points out. When Phil was designing the distillery, he contracted a consulting firm owned and operated by people with disabilities of all kinds to review their design plans. “You ask the consumer to…bring themselves into the space. There’s this cool sort of idea like you bring the liquid into your body, bring your body into the space. Those should be coherent experiences that feel the same and it should be open to anybody.” Phil asserts. “So we did our entire design [so that] no matter where a person falls in the sensory spectrum, intellectual spectrum, mobility spectrum…it would feel like this place was made for them.” he illustrates. “That’s been another element of trying to bring that Brother Justus hospitality–you enhance the experience for everybody by making sure that you’re including everybody.”
Even the bottles and labels are striking, stark and attractive in their simplicity and their bold, simple Christian crosses writ large. He remembers a moment when one of his daughters was a toddler and they took her to a playground full of other kids. All the children were running in every direction, moving everywhere he looked, but his daughter stood still as she analyzed the new setting. “I remembered, anyone who was standing there, the one kid they would have noticed was the kid that was standing still while everyone else was running.” he recounts. Phil wanted the guiding aesthetic for Brother Justus’ bottles and label to be like that - drawing the eye by standing still and calm on an otherwise cacophonous liquor shelf.
How did consumers feel about the prominently featured crosses on the new label? “The bell curve is squarely within people saying it’s beautiful, modern, clean, that it looks like quality,” Phil replies. The advertising firm Brother Justus worked with out of Colorado–talented, ‘tatted to the jaw’, and with zero apparent religious affiliation–flew to Minnesota, visited the monastery, the cooperage, and the peat bog. “They saw it all, and they actually proposed that.” Phil reveals. “There were definitely some butterflies in this day and age, to feel like you could do that without pissing everybody off and people making judgements about you…and God knows, I’m not here to stir any pots.” he says. “We’re not a religious business, we’re not a faith-based business. But this is a historical story, and it’s rooted in an approach to craft that has this inextricable religious element to it.” he explains. “You can’t extract the faith from that time.” It’s an aesthetic Phil is personally comfortable with, having lived in a monastery. “It’s not a missionary aesthetic,” he says. “It’s simply a sign of care, that what’s in here really matters and it’s meant to be good and enjoyable for you if that’s what you want…that’s how I think most people experience it.”
“Whiskey, to me, is a thing that you bring into yourself but that actually expands you when you taste it.”
While Brother Justus taught his neighbors how to survive hard economic times–and underscored the difference between ‘immoral’ and ‘illegal’--Phil is using the unique and special climate and ingredients of Minnesota, expressed as award-winning craft whiskeys, to spread Brother Justus’ other, less practical, but no less valuable teachings . “You have a right to support yourself, but you have a responsibility to serve your neighbor and help your neighbor. The work of a human being is to figure out how to do both,” Phil tells us. “That is the ethic I think we need. You hear the voices come up and say, ‘Ah, the only smart move is to be selfish…to be cynical, to cut corners, slash standards, grab what you can.’ I don’t think it’s true. I’ve never thought that’s true,” he says. “It’s definitely a way some people choose, and some of them make a lot of money and do well, but I don’t see those people in the life that I’ve lived. I see people like Brother Justus.” he states. “That’s a story I want to tell–if I do nothing else, and people learn that story, that’s a legacy.”
Tasting Notes
American Single Malt | Silver Whiskey (43% ABV)
Nose: Ripe Cantaloupe, Lemon Oil, Malt, Grass
Palate: The mouthfeel is light and oily with with notes of grain and a delicate sugar sweetness up front. The sweetness persists through the mid-palate, though pivoting to a melon fruitiness as the grain fades away, ceding to earthy and slightly bitter flavors on a short finish.
As people who have been around their fair share of white whiskey, the nose on this is quite welcoming. Lacking the solvent sweetness most unaged whiskey has, the combination of aromas is intriguing. On the palate it is reminiscent of a good blanco tequila. We’re not sure this would be a go to sipper for the average whiskey drinker, but we bet it would be incredible in cocktails. We’d love to see a margarita with this whiskey.
American Single Malt Whiskey (43% ABV)
Nose: Cherry, Grains, Oak, Grass
Palate: The mouthfeel is light and oil with notes of vanilla and oak up front. Those flavors remain across the tasting experience with chocolate, black pepper, and a slight smokiness joining in the mid-palate and throughout a medium finish.
While the nose was potentially telling of a younger whiskey, a bit one dimensional, especially in comparison to the Silver Whiskey, the palate is a crowd pleaser. Quintessential malt whiskey flavors. We found ourselves going back for a sip again and again until the glass had to be refilled. We would compare this to most highly lauded entry level Scotches and we’d love to see what a cask strength offering would provide in extra flavor. Ultimately, we think it’s a great proof of concept that whiskey can be distilled higher than 160 proof and still be flavorful and high quality.
American Single Malt | Cold-Peated ® Whiskey (43% ABV)
Nose: Vanilla, Malted Milk Balls, Salted Pretzels, Oak, Peat
Palate: The mouthfeel is light and oily with notes of orange and oak up front. Oak and spice dominate the mid-palate, clearing the way for peat, vanilla, malt, grain and oak to harmonize in the mid-palate through a long finish.
Ladies and gentlemen, the star of the show has arrived. Wow. What an experience. Not only is this packed full of flavor, but the way the peat plays on both the nose and the palate is truly unlike anything we’ve experienced with another peated whiskey. You get the flavor and the earthiness of the peat, but it’s not smoky. For such a polarizing and specific flavor, in this application it actually plays exceptionally well with others. Rather than being a dominate voice, it merely adds an octave in a cacophony of flavors. Is it better or worse than traditional smoked peat? Who’s to say? Also, who cares? Is this the kind of innovation and experimentation you want to see out of America’s craft producers? Yes!