A long and patiently aged whiskey is only as good as the grain it's born from. With our oldest expression to date, we're tapping into the time-honored techniques of the farmer distillers who invented the category in America's early days. To kick start fermentation they malted a small portion of their yearly harvest. This delicate heating process opens up the grain, allowing yeasts easier access to the sugars they'll soon convert to alcohol. It also imbues the resulting spirit with floral and earthy tonalities. Our mash bill 79% rye, 15% malted rye and 6% malted barley creates a sipping experience that evolves on the palate from soft and supple to rich and savory. A thrilling encounter accentuated by 18 years of maturation in virgin oak.
What you smell and taste in a whisky is highly subjective.
Even the pros do not always agree on the tasting notes. Therefore, we have combined the tasting notes from several sources into a cross-section Nose, Palate, and Finish to find the commonalities between two whiskies. We use the Aroma Wheel with its concentric circles of increasingly specific tastes and smells (general in the center; more specific the further out you go) to find Exact, Secondary, and General matches between two whiskies. We also take into account other important factors like mash bill, barrel type(s), ABV, region, ratings, price and more. We then weight each factor based on what we believe to be the approximate importance it has in determining whether two whiskies are similar.
We're all different.
Again, we cannot stress enough that what you smell and taste in a whisky is likely going to be different than the person you're drinking it with. Whisky Mates is meant to be a guide to help you find what you like drinking, using the best methodologies available. In the end, rely on your own palate to tell you what you like and don't like.