By Richard Thomas
Ranking: B+
Excessive West Bottled in Bond Rye
(Credit score: Richard Thomas)
Utah’s Excessive West earned its fame as a fan favourite by their transparency. The corporate was amongst people who tried and proved the trail of utilizing sourced whiskey to develop a model whereas mustering the assets and experience to construct a working distillery, develop whiskeys and mature them. What made them the darling of so many whiskey nerds a decade in the past was that they have been a part of a small class that disclosed their sourcing, at the least insofar as their contractual obligations allowed them to. Barrell Craft Spirits and Clean Ambler additionally garnered plaudits from the fanatic group for transparency.
Excessive West continues to depend on sourcing to today, however their objective from the start was to make an in-house rye whiskey. They crossed that milestone years in the past, and this rye has discovered its method into their merchandise. Double Rye, for instance, mixes a large majority of MGP-sourced rye with their in-house product. That has a lot been the case that I don’t really recall any method to get at Excessive West’s rye whiskey in and of itself, as a result of it’s so usually merely a part of one among their legacy expressions.
Or that was the case till Excessive West Bottled in Bond Rye got here alongside in February 2024. The mash behind this whiskey is 80% rye, 20% malted rye, each from a hybrid pressure of grain known as Guittino. As a bonded whiskey, the inventory comes solely from a single distilling yr, the expression is a minimal of 4 years outdated (the batch numeration suggests it’s a 5 yr outdated, however that goes unspoken on the labeling) and its 100 proof.
The Whiskey
The pour has a transparent, vibrant and light-weight amber look within the glass. The scent brings out each components of what I might count on from its mash invoice: cookie spice and peppermint on the one hand, and pumpernickel dough on the opposite. There’s a woody word that’s extra cedar and than oak, plus one other word of vanilla. The palate follows and develops very a lot in that vein: the usual pumpernickel and molasses that comes with malted rye a lot of the time, plus notes of dill, peppermint, cookie spices, fennel and cedar. The end spins out peppery and woody.
The Worth
Anticipate to pay $80 a bottle.
