In the oversaturated spirits market that is battling with declining alcohol consumption numbers, distilleries are always looking for something novel to set themselves apart from the competition. I’ve encountered two new — or at least new-to-me — products in the market lately that I think are worthy of your attention.
The first is the new Green River Honey-Finished Whiskey. I’ve been a fan of a lot of the products from Green River Distillery, the best thing to come out of Owensboro, Ky., since Interstate 165. Now owned by Lofted Spirits, the parent company of Bardstown Bourbon Co., Green River distills their own products alongside contract work for some other popular smaller brands and celebrity whiskeys.
The distillery recognizes that consumers go crazy for honey whiskeys, whether they're actually infused liqueurs like Wild Turkey’s American Honey or simply finished in previously used whiskey barrels that then held honey before finally finishing the whiskey again — like Belle Meade Bourbon has done with its Honey Cask Bourbon.
Green River has taken a combination of those two approaches to their new product. First, they distill a batch of their flagship product, a 4-year-old straight bourbon made using their signature 70 percent corn/21 percent rye/9 percent malted barley mash bill recipe, and then create a blend of 100 percent real honey sourced from local farms.
Green River adds that honey directly to the barrels of whiskey, eschewing extracts or syrupy liqueurs in favor of just adding the sweetness and slight funkiness of real, honest-to-goodness honey. It’s rare that you see instructions to shake a bottle of spirits before drinking, but that’s what the distillery wants you to do to ensure that the flavors are spread evenly.
The result is a delightfully toasty and spicy honey whiskey, not cloyingly sweet or overpowering of the bourbon undertones. At a standard retail price of just $25 a bottle, it’s great for drinking straight up or over a large cube of ice. It also takes one step out of one of my favorite cocktails, The Gold Rush. Instead of making a honey syrup, you can just add 2 ounces of Green River Honey-Finished Bourbon to a shaker tin with three-quarters of an ounce of lemon juice and half an ounce of simple syrup, shake it with ice until your hand gets cold and pour it over fresh ice for a fantastic cocktail.
You can thank me after you enjoy one of those poolside soon. (But remember to use a plastic tumbler!)
Rum is another summertime favorite, but the range of quality and artisanal spirit among rum producers is unfortunately vast. The Caribbean is basically the Wild West when it comes to rules and regulations, with massive warehousing operations blending different types of spirits from different countries and adding flavors and coloring to come up with their final products.
Rum wasn't always that way. In fact, the U.S. used to be known for rum production even before we became a global whiskey capital. Especially around Louisiana, we used to have a strong domestic sugar cane industry, long before sugar beets from the Midwest passed traditional cane sugar as the sweetener of choice.
A few Southern distilleries are still leaning on the old methods of agricole-style rhums, which are produced from fresh-pressed cane juice instead of from molasses, the thick by-product from sugar production. Rhum agricole demonstrates the potential seasonality of the spirit as the cane changes over the course of time. It often exhibits an earthy, vegetal flavor that is more complex than many Caribbean rums.
Baton Rouge-based Oxbow Rum Distillery is one of the leaders in domestic agricole-style rhum production. I recently got to sample their Oxbow Rhum Louisiane Cane Juice Agricole, and I personally think this is a fascinating product.
Photo courtesy of Oxbow
The company harvests cane in the fall and presses the canes fresh from the fields. They then pot-distill the juice in small batches to create a rhum that shows off the character of the terroir of Louisiana and changes from year to year. Forget the craze to buy a Ninja Slushi Frozen Drink Machine (I know, I know, I thought about buying one too ...), but a proper daiquiri should have the consistency of an Icee.
A legit daiquiri is rum, lime juice and simple syrup, shaken and served neat in a chilled glass. Such simplicity means that it’s up to the ingredients to provide the complexity, and the only potentially mutable ingredient is the rum.
So the daiquiris I made with Oxbow demonstrated that green vegetal complexity and slightly oily mouthfeel that really elevated the classic cocktail. The retail price is around $42 to $45 per bottle, so you should be able to make a dozen daiquiris for about $4 apiece. I challenge you to do that at Fat Tuesdays in New Orleans!
Drink better.
