Barrell American Vatted Malt Batch 001 Whiskey Review

By Richard Thomas

Rating: B+

Ever since distillery construction exploded in America, I have been awaiting the rise of independent blenders who truly mirrored the work of negociants in the Scotch Whisky trade. Then the American craft spirits movement began moving into the vacuum of American Malt Whiskey, the one place that none of the big distillers or Kentucky and Tennessee had even a toehold. * That opened the prospect of something to directly compare to the vatted Scottish malts.

The first example was the 2016 Four Kings American Malt, made with malt whiskeys from FEW Spirits, Corsair, Mississippi River Distilling Company and Journeyman. However, this wasn’t really what I had in mind, since it didn’t reflect the blender’s art of choosing particular whiskeys like a painter working with pigments. In the Four Kings project, the distilleries and often even the proportions are pre-set, so it’s a happy accident if the resulting blend comes out as more than the sum of its parts.

Of course, it was Barrell Craft Spirits that produced the first proper American vatted malt. The company has a well-earned reputation for releasing quality sourced whiskeys, a key aspect of an independent bottler. With Barrell American Vatted Malt Batch 001, they have become proper blenders as well, for this whiskey doesn’t draw on just one or two sources: it uses malts acquired from Balcones, Hamilton, MGP, Harvest, Santa Fe and Kings County.

Here at The Whiskey Reviewer, we weren’t just eagerly awaiting a development like this. We’re also the only whiskey media outlet that can claim to be familiar with the American Malts coming from five of those six distilleries.

The Whiskey
As always with Barrel Craft Spirits, this is a cask strength release, coming in at 117.5 proof (58.75% ABV). The liquid has a pale amber appearance, just a hair too dark to count as golden. It formed a solid coat inside my glass, only slowly forming a beady crown and never getting around to unfolding its legs.

Although not too hot on my nose, I got the feeling this whiskey would require water to bring the best out of it, so in went a splash. From there, I got wildflowers and grass coupled to a hint of spice and wood, with a faint hint of caramel hovering throughout.

A sip revealed a whiskey that was sweet, creamy and tinged with saltwater toffee, this joined by rising pepper and ash. The finish rolled off that rising tide of pepper and ash, holding those notes as the whiskey faded away.

It’s remarkable how much this blend of American malts is reminiscent of a peated Scottish malt from somewhere in the mainland of Scotland, a distillery not on an island or a coastal area. There is a little salt in that saltwater toffee note, but nothing like the briny seaspray one gets from many whiskies aged near the sea.

My summary advice is if you like American Whiskey and you like Scotch Whisky, get a bottle of this and keep an eye out for Batch 002.

The Price
Expect to pay $89 a bottle for this item.

* At the time spirits writers began describing American Malts as “the next big thing,” this was very much the case. The only large distillery making malt whiskey on a regular basis was MGP. In 2019, Woodford Reserve released an American Malt and finally put a big brand into the sector.