Breckenridge Spiced Whiskey

A Straight Bourbon Whiskey by Master Distiller Jordan Via for Breckenridge Distillery in Colorado made with a mash bill of 56% corn, 38% rye & 6% malted barley. Then put it in an open-top Scottish fermenter & distilled twice through a 550-gallon Kentucky-made copper pot still, then matured for at least 3 years in Char #3 American white oak casks, then brought to proof using the purest Rocky Mountain snowmelt from 14,000 feet. It has a fresh & aromatic birth with notes of under-ripe bananas & white pepper; while a spicy life adds notes of fruit, brown sugar, clove, rye, white pepper & toasted sesame; that led to a short & delicate death with notes of malted barley, thin honey & vanilla. April / September 2019 / August 2022

Christmas

Red hots and cinnamon spice

Strictly mixer

Great in an Old Fashioned.

I’ve never tried a spiced whiskey before, but I’m curious. Nose: Christmas. It smells like a Christmas candle. All cinnamon and clove. Appearance: amber with medium legs. Kind of oily. First sip neat: tastes kind of like a Christmas candle might taste. Overwhelming clove and cinnamon, but not a lot of sweetness to balance it. It’s like if you soaked a handful of cloves and a cinnamon stick in some alcohol overnight. Maybe a bit of orange peel in there. But it’s bitter- like a cinnamon stick. Man, I wish this had some sweetness to it. It wouldn’t taste like bourbon, but it would taste like childhood Christmas nostalgia. With water: like an unsweetened holiday-flavored hot tea that’s sipped through a cinnamon stick. Finish: medium, bitter. I feel like I’ve been drinking the contents of a Bath and Body Works on Black Friday, condensed into liquid form. What a disappointment. This could’ve been so good. However, that being said, I think where it would really shine is in fall-themed cocktails, like a holiday Old Fashioned with orange bitters and garnished with a cinnamon stick. I’m not willing to write it off completely- I just won’t be drinking it neat. There’s lots of unique cocktail potential, though!