New Riff Kentucky Straight Bourbon Bottled In Bond

This one has been growing on me. Smooth start with a modest bite. Nice full flavor.

High rye bourbon with great balance. Pepper, vanilla, caramel notes.

Very rye in this mash. Good flavor, vanilla and medicine is prominent in this whiskey. It is very smooth for a 4ish year old whiskey. Tastes a year or two older than it should. Not a huge rye fame so still a bit to much for my taste.

I hadn't heard of New Riff until this year and then, all of a sudden, it was everywhere. Dedicated bourbon fan groups were making sojourns to this northern Kentucky-Cincinnati area distillery to do single barrel picks. These guys have not been around for long and finally reached the critical 4-year age point where they could start releasing their product as a bottled-in-bond bottle. To their tremendous credit, they waited that long to do it and insisted on their basic release being bottled-in-bond. It really pays off. If this is what a 4-year old New Riff tastes like . . . these guys are the Kilchoman of the American whiskey world. There's nothing unusual about it yet, but it's just really good bourbon, with all of the expected caramel, heavy hitting vanilla, and mellow spice that one would expect from their high-rye mash bill. I'm already a fan and looking forward with tremendous excitement to what this distillery can accomplish in the next decade.