Castle & Key Distillery - Wheated Bourbon Whiskey Batch #1

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Batch #1 ||  73% White Corn, 10% Wheat, 17% Malted Barley

Brand Tasting Notes: Cocoa powder, toffee, buttercream, cereal grain, black pepper, and baked pear. The palate has caramelized sugar, pie crust, roasted cashews, dried apricots, grains of paradise, and fennel. The finish has dark honey with hints of black pepper, medium-bodied and sweetness.

Castle & Key was founded by Will Arvin and his partners, who restored the mothballed Old Taylor Distillery in 2014. Old Taylor was originally built by Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor, Jr. in 1887, a name you might recognize from Buffalo Trace’s EH Taylor Jr. lineup of bourbon and rye. Taylor also was one of the forces behind the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897. Indeed, the world of bourbon has a lot of crossover like this, but that’s because a lot of the old guys (and yes, they were virtually all men) were involved with different distilleries and different brand names throughout their careers. The distillery had a lot of flair, including the castle referenced in the new name, but was shuttered when Prohibition began. After this failed Noble Experiment, it passed through different owners and was ultimately left to molder with neglect. Fast-forward to the mid-2010s, and things were happening again as the distillery was transformed into Castle & Key, with Marianne Eaves taking on the role of master distiller (she moved on from that job in 2019). Over the years, the distillery has been contract-distilling for other brands, as well as releasing in-house produced rye whiskey, vodka, and gin. Which leads us to the brand-new bourbon.