Foreign

Colkegan Single Malt

Colkegan Single Malt

Santa Fe Spirits was founded in 2010 by Englishman Colin Keegan. An architect by trade, Colin and his family built their home on an old apple orchard in the American Southwest in the early 90s. Colin decided to look at the Recession of 2008/09 as an opportunity and founded Santa Fe Spirits. After a decade and more in production, Santa Fe Spirits offer vodka, gin, apple brandy (from the orchards) and liqueurs. Their flagship product, however, is the Colkegan Single Malt. A portmanteau of the distillery’s founder, the Colkegan line uses local mesquite wood to dry a portion of the barley used in the whiskey, with other versions using various proofage and cask finishes.

Cleveland Underground Sugar Maple

Cleveland Underground Sugar Maple

Back in 2009, navy veteran Tom Lix started experimenting with whiskey. But not in the traditional sense. Cleveland Whiskey seeks to push the envelope about what is possible with whiskey, from how it is produced and aged to the regular taste profiles generally expected in the industry. The Underground series is the distilleries main line, each offering ages in traditional barrels for about six months before going through a proprietary process involving pressure extractions and differing wood combinations using more exotic woods rarely seen as finishing elements. The Cleveland Underground Super Maple is a bourbon finished with sugar maple wood using this transformative method. 

Cedar Ridge The QuintEssential

Cedar Ridge The QuintEssential

Cedar Ridge Winery and Distilltery was founded in 2005 by Jeff Quint and family. They released their first bourbon in 2010 and have gradually expanded to include rum, gin and fruit brandy. Yet their main focus remains whiskey, as is evidenced from their almost dozen different offerings. The distillery’s first American single malt was released in 2020, the QuintEssential. Besides being a smart play on the family name, this single malt makes use of the other aspects of the business and involves a complex aging and finishing process involving 20 different types of casks, a solera system, and a mixture of peated and unpeated malt from Canada. While looking to Scotland for inspiration, Cedar Ridge also embraces the exploratory nature of craft distilling in America and future releases of the QuintEssential promise to continue pushing boundaries.