Mingo Creek Craft Distillers, better known by their brand name Liberty Pole, are a craft distillery in southwestern Pennsylvania who deftly weave the line between history and imagination. Their whiskey-focused portfolio includes offerings made using heritage grains like bloody butcher corn and Pennsylvania rye. But they’re not afraid to get creative, as seen by their Peated Bourbon. After seeing what peat could do with with corn, they wondered…why not rye? A few years later, the Liberty Pole Peated Rye was born. The result was so successful, it has become a staple of their portfolio and is released about once a year.
Kilchoman Am Bùrach
Mistakes happen. In many professions, you have to sweep whatever the results were under the proverbial rug and start over. At Kilchoman distillery, unnamed employee mistakenly combined a three year old run of their flagship Machir Bay with a fresh ex-port matured expression in 2014. Instead of washing it down the drain or drinking it immediately, they stuck it in an ex-bourbon barrel to see if time would provide any hope before finishing the strange marriage off in an ex-ruby port cask. The beginning and the maturation process were, as the general manager called it, “am bùrach”, or “a mess”. The Kilchoman Am Bùrach is a unique mistake in many ways, not lease of which is that it survived and thrived long enough to be bottled. The ultimate hope of any young spirit.