By Richard Thomas In what one pundit called “The Golden Age of Whiskey Books,” moonshine has been getting a disproportionate amount of attention. I imagine this is because illicit liquor-making makes for such good non-fiction storytelling, and just maybe the hipster chic that attached itself to moonshine several years ago helps just a bit too. Yet most books on the ...

By Richard Thomas When it comes to making the copper stills so vital to the world whiskey trade, two names stand out in the minds of whiskey fans. One is Forsyths, the Scottish copperworks that is literally a global institution. The other is more of an American classic, since its products often remain in the United States, and that is ...

By Richard Thomas When Templeton Rye launched its product several years ago, they accompanied it with a marketing campaign full of tales of Prohibition-era bootlegging and Al Capone. The company soon got itself into trouble in whiskey circles for its misleading claims of making a rye based on Iowa bootlegging recipes, when it was in fact bottling LDI’s 95% rye. ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: A+ While Bourbon Barrel Foods didn’t start with its soy sauce, that product is easily its most famous. According to company founder Matt Jamie, he “paid for my soy sauce production with bourbon-smoked paprika,” but it was his micro-brewed Bluegrass Soy Sauce that captured headlines and got itself on the Louisville episode of Bizarre Foods America. ...

The owner and managing editor of The Whiskey Reviewer published his new novel today, the second volume in the Stonewall Goes West series. As Part Two of the Stonewall Goes West trilogy, Mother Earth, Bloody Ground continues to answer the greatest “what if?” of the Civil War: what if Stonewall Jackson had survived the Battle of Chancellorsville? Through a combination ...