Foreign

High Coast Sixty Three

High Coast Sixty Three

Sweden is a northern country and High Coast Distillery is on the outskirts there too, situated in Sörviken at 63ºN. That latitude served as the inspiration of the High Coast Sixty Three, where every element of the whisky and its making that could be rounded to that number was. It is peated single malt whisky peated to 63ppm, matured in 198 63 liter casks for 63 months (5+years), aged at 63 decimeters – roughly 20 feet – below ground. The first batch of this limited edition was bottled at 63ºF. Heck, the price of the grain in the Swedish currency was 6.3 krona per kilogram. The batch size was a 6300 liter wort and the average fermentation time was 63 hours. Even the cooper who made the barrels was born in 1963.

Wood Hat Twin Timbers

Wood Hat Twin Timbers

Wood Hat Spirits was founded in 2012 by Gary Hinegardner. It is so named from one of Gary’s non-distilling hobbies: carving wooden hats. When not carving a wide variety of those hats, Gary and his team are creating bourbons and whiskies made using Missouri sources, from the wooden barrels to the grains using the only wood-fired still in the United States. While the offerings explore a wide variety of corn varietals, the creativity can also be seen in finishes. The Wood Hat Twin Timbers begins as their Rubenesque bourbon made of blue corn that is at least two years old, but then finished in charred pecan barrels, providing both oak and pecan to have voice in the whiskey.

Branch & Barrel Plumwood

Branch & Barrel Plumwood

Branch & Barrel Distilling was founded in 2015 by friends Ryan Morgan, Scott Freund and Tom Sielaff after years of aging new make whiskey with different woods. One of them was wood from a plum tree, and was perhaps the one that finally pushed them into getting the distillery off the ground for real. The base spirit is a bourbon mash with high barley but some of their offerings are not aged in virgin oak barrels and thus do not meet the regulatory requirements to call it bourbon. The Branch & Barrel Plumwood is matured entirely in plum wood barrels and made in very small batches.