Courage & Conviction Store Pick American Single Malt Whiskey

Our Store Pick is a Single Cask #1490. The nose opens with a great balance of cinnamon, cherry, red apples, peanut skin, maple and coconut. On the palate maple flavors are joined by funnel cake, baking spices, peppercorn, and red fruits. 58.9% ABV 50% ex-Bourbon barrels, and 25% each Sherry casks and STR barrels.    D&M Tasting Notes

A new producer from a category of American Whiskey that is both very new, and very old. Let us explain. The TTB is on the cusp of codifying what it means to have a label read ‘American Single Malt,’ the first new category in United States whiskey since Rye in the middle of the twentieth century.  The proposed rules are as follows: “American Single Malt must be made from 100 percent malted barley, it must be distilled at a single distillery, and it must be mashed, distilled and aged in America.” This is quite close to the Scottish definition with a couple of key differences. For one– there is not a requirement that the whiskey must be aged in oak barrels, nor does it have to be older than three years. This is a nod to some of the more than two hundred different American producers of Single Malt and a handful of producers with barrels made from wood other than oak. In fact, there are more producers of Single Malt in the United States right now than there are in the whole of Scotland. There is hope that this will leave open the possibility for greater experimentation and different regional bottlings from mesquite smoked Southwest single malt to whisky put into new charred oak barrels as Stranahan’s has done. We are happy to highlight Virginia Distilling- a business that is solely focused on the production of Single Malt in the Blue Ridge Mountains of central Virginia. They were Distillery and Whisky of the year at this year’s London Spirits Competition. Michael Kennel, D&M