7 Pours, No Tasting Notes, All Stories

I’ve been quiet for a bit. Not the good kind of quiet where I’m off somewhere sipping something rare and taking notes for later — the kind where life just eats your recording schedule alive. The samples kept arriving anyway, stacking up on the shelf like little reminders that I owed some friends of the show an actual conversation. So that’s what this one is: a backlog episode. Seven pours, no formal tasting notes, and a lot of catching up on what’s actually happening in this industry right now.

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The first thing I cracked open was a pair of bottles that are clearly in on the joke with each other — one labeled Kentslyvania, one labeled Penntucky. It’s a collaboration between Liberty Pole Spirits out of Washington, Pennsylvania, and MB Roland Distillery out of Pembroke, Kentucky, timed to land around the country’s 250th anniversary. The concept is simple on paper and more interesting the longer you sit with it: each distillery picked one of its own barrels and one from the other, then built its own blend from the same four base whiskies. Liberty Pole’s version leans on their sweet-mash, double-pot-distilled Monongahela rye tradition. MB Roland’s leans on their pre-prohibition style and that dark-fired corn they’re known for in western Kentucky.

I could pick out the MB Roland character almost immediately just from the nose — that distinct house profile doesn’t hide easily, blend or not. The Penntucky version read a little more rye-forward to me, though I’ll cop to that being purely anecdotal. What I actually want to flag here isn’t which one “wins,” because that’s not the point. It’s that I think we’re going to see more of this kind of thing — distilleries using each other as an introduction to markets they don’t already have a foothold in. If you want to understand western Kentucky whiskey, MB Roland is a great front door. If you want Pennsylvania rye, Liberty Pole is exactly that. Pairing up isn’t a competition, it’s a proxy.

From there I moved to something that’s been sitting on my shelf longer than I’d like to admit — Dark Arts Whiskey House’s Empyrean, a high-rye bourbon finished separately in red and white port casks. Macaulay Minton and the Dark Arts team have built their whole identity around blending and finishing rather than distilling from scratch, and this one leans into that fully: seven-and-a-half-year Indiana distillate, finished in white port casks specifically, which is a less common move than the usual red port play. The name is a reach for “highest heaven,” and honestly, letting it sit and open up in the glass for a while, it earns a little bit of that reach. Thick, syrupy texture, long legs in the glass. No notes today, but it’s good. Real good.

Next was something I picked up in person, not shipped to me — an Estate Bourbon from Lux Row Distillers in Bardstown, from a trip I took a few months back with their team. This is a five-year rye bourbon mash bill (78% corn, 12% malted barley, 10% rye) where the corn was grown on the eleven-acre plot that now houses three of their rickhouses. That’s the kind of detail that sounds like marketing copy until you actually think through the logistics — harvesting a single eleven-acre field means dedicated equipment runs, dedicated storage, no cross-contamination with any other crop. It’s expensive to do at that scale, which is exactly why a five-year bourbon carries a price tag that would otherwise raise an eyebrow. It’s a limited, distillery-exclusive pour, and it’s a genuinely interesting one for anyone who cares about where their grain actually comes from.

Then there’s a whiskey with a complicated history: Pride of Anderson County, the collaboration between Rare Character Whiskey Co. and Wild Turkey historian David Jennings. The original run was a limited lottery release tied explicitly to Wild Turkey — expensive, scarce, and it made a lot of people upset in the way whiskey people get upset. This new chapter is different. It’s transitioning into an ongoing single barrel series releasing twice a year, going national instead of staying a one-off. Whether or not it’s tied to a specific named source doesn’t really change my read on it — Rare Character’s track record speaks for itself, and this pour backed that up. It might be the best thing I tried all night.

A couple of quick hits before I wrap: Green River Distilling Co.‘s tasting-room-exclusive ceramic decanters are some of the most fun packaging in the category right now, and the whiskey inside holds up regardless of what else is happening with their parent company — a story I’ll let the actual news outlets cover.

And finally, the one I’m most excited about: I joined Casey Jones Distillery‘s new public barrel pick program, open to anyone who wants to sign up. We worked through five barrels alongside folks from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, converged on the same favorite before anyone knew what it was, and that barrel is now the official Kentucky Bourbon Festival pick for the year. It’ll be available at the festival this fall — and if you’re going, that’s a bottle worth standing in line for.

Off the spirits beat, I’m keeping up the monthly cocktail series on Substack (this month: a bourbon blackberry smash) and running album reviews as advance copies come in. More episodes are coming, including some familiar faces from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival world before summer’s out.

If you want the full conversation — the tape-wrestling, the tangents, all of it — the episode is live now on audio, YouTube, and right here on Substack, if that’s your thing.

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