“When MGP was cleaning up old inventory, they found the barrels,” says Coyle. Back in the ’90s, some excess stock didn’t fit on a truck destined for Canada, and the distillery simply forgot to schedule another delivery. “It quite honestly fell off the books,” says Brendon Coyle, High West’s master distiller. (Once High West bought the stock, they likely transferred it to a tank for a few years before bottling). As a light whiskey, it should have been dumped from the barrel after just a few years it certainly was never intended to rest for 14 years, as it did. In April 2016, it bottled a light whiskey that had been distilled in 1999 at the Lawrenceburg, Indiana, distillery that would go on to become MGP. High West Distillery was among the first to notice this development. It failed to catch on as a standalone spirit and, for the last three decades, has been used as the cheaper, more neutral component of lighter American and Canadian blends. These factors resulted in a mildly flavored, almost vodka-like whiskey. (Bourbon, by contrast, usually enters the barrel in the 100- to 125-proof range and legally can never be distilled higher than 160.) Light whiskey would then be briefly aged in used barrels, typically bourbon barrels, which, having gone through the ringer a few times, were largely lacking in char flavor. The bottles had names like Crow Light, Galaxy and Four Roses Premium-the latter’s slogan boasting a “taste that underwhelms.” Far from a success when it was first introduced, this long-derided category is undergoing a revival, all thanks to the discovery of a forgotten stock from the 1990s.īy definition, light whiskey had to be distilled to at least 160 proof, though it was typically distilled as high as 190 proof, stripping it of its flavor until it closely resembled grain neutral spirit (GNS). In 1972, the American bourbon industry introduced a new category of whiskey that unreservedly leaned into its lack of flavor as a ploy to win the attention of a public increasingly enamored of vodka.
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