The Distiller’s Journal

Whiskey 101

“You can’t call it bourbon, that can only be made in Kentucky.” If I had a dollar for every…
Over the past couple years we’ve had thousands of people visit the distillery for our tours, most of which our braniac tour guide and distiller Mike hosts (he’s a scientist at a biotech by day, whiskey distiller by night and weekend). There’s a lot of information to pack into a 45 minute tour, so we decided to create our “Whiskey 101” card. Not only do we cover the Federal requirement to make bourbon whiskey (take note of the A-G acronym), we also cover the other 3 whiskey categories – Scotch, Irish, and Canadian.
The cool thing about this card is you can start to correlate the laws around how they are produced to how the products taste. For example, bourbon has to be aged in a new barrel unlike the other categories, and as you know, bourbon is a rich, heavily wood influenced type of whiskey. There’s lots of other fun stuff on the card as well. We can even usually teach a seasoned “whiskey geek” a thing or two on the card.

So keep all these factoids in your back pocket for the next time you’re sharing a glass with friends or standing around the water cooler on a dull Monday morning!

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