Arts And Crafts
Twenty years ago – has it been that long already? – the big beer giants of the world were knocked on their collective asses by what started out small and what would be destined to become all the rage – the now much-ballyhooed craft beer brewery [or microbrewery, if you so desire] movement. The popularity of home-brewing in the 1980s turned thousands of people – mostly males who didn’t have to worry about dating – into beer connoisseurs overnight. Or if not connoisseurs, at least more knowledgeable beer drinkers. This, in turn, sparked the beer revolution that turned everybody’s noses up at Bud and Coors and helped create the craft beer/microbrew craze of the 90s when the number of craft breweries in the United States alone jumped from a mere eight in 1980 to 537 in 1994 [and to 1600 in 2010]. Of course, this meant the parent companies of Bud and Coors eventually had to buy some of these breweries or make their own pretend-craft beer and market it as a craft beer, but that is the price to pay for capitalism and greed.
Now, the whiskey industry is in the first stages of its own craft period. The number of craft whiskey distilleries are beginning to multiply and find themselves in locations well outside the usual Bourbon-Whiskey Belt in Kentucky and Tennessee as well as the worldwide whisky mecca of Scotland while using a staggering array of ingredients to enhance the various whiskies [similar to the m.o. used by craft breweries of yore]. We profiled the products of one of those craft distilleries – Dry Fly – earlier this month and there are two more which WC would recommend to your palate – Balcones and Journeyman.
Balcones is based smack-dab in beer drinker central – Texas [Waco] – and yet the three best products to emerge from the distillery since its birth in 2008 are distinctly light years away from beer and happen to be damn good whiskey as well. They are Baby Blue – a blue corn whiskey that nibbles at your brain lobes, Rumble, a wildflower honey [thanks bees!] and turbinado sugar whiskey that is sort of like a love child from a Jamaican rum plantation and Tennessee whiskey distillery and then Brimstone which, well, the name speaks for itself, lights your fire between now and next Tuesday. Balcones Whiskey has already won several national and international awards and if you were placing a wager in Vegas on the success of Balcones, you could start counting your money.
Journeyman does not yet have the awards of Balcones and is even newer – having inly been open for a mere two years – but looks to have a made a promising start with its Ravenswood Rye. Based in Michigan, the distillery now has three whiskies to tout – adding the Buggy Whip Wheat and Featherstone Bourbon to the party – but the Ravenswood Rye is still the clear winner of the trio. It’s a young whiskey but its wise beyond its years.
