Pinhook Kicks Off 2020 With In-House Straight Rye

Pinhook Bourbon has released its 2020 Kentucky Straight Ry, the first whiskey in half a century to come from barrels aged at the legendary Old Taylor Distillery (now Castle & Key) and Pinhook’s first release crafted from its custom Kentucky distillate.

The much-anticipated unbarreling marks a new chapter for America’s native spirit. The Old Taylor Distillery, a towering and long-abandoned icon of America’s bourbon heritage, was founded in Woodford County, Kentucky, by the father of American whiskey, Colonel E.H. Taylor.

At a time when much U.S. craft whiskey production takes place outside the Bluegrass State, the 2020 Pinhook Straight Rye celebrates whiskey as a true drink of place, made from the state’s inimitable pure limestone-filtered water. In the words of Pinhook Master Taster and co-founder Sean Josephs, “Our first bottling of a custom Pinhook mashbill is a labor of love and a throwback to the days when Colonel Taylor selected the Castle & Key site because its ground spring was the perfect source for water, whiskey’s most important ingredient.”

As with all Pinhook releases, the 2020 Pinhook Kentucky Straight Rye (750 ML, with a suggested retail price of $38) takes the unusual vintage approach, more commonly associated with wine-making, for which the brand has become known. While maintaining the highest, state-of-the-art distilling standards, which Colonel Taylor championed, Pinhook uses the art of blending to release and cultivate the unique personality of each individual barrel. Rather than replicating a one-size-fits-all flavor profile, the brand’s approach embraces unconformity and surprise.

Josephs, a certified wine sommelier, helped pioneer the modern U.S. whiskey boom by opening the beloved American whiskey-focused restaurants Char No. 4 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn in 2008 and Maysville in Manhattan in 2012. GQ called Char No. 4 “one of the two best places to drink whiskey in America.” Says Josephs, “As a sommelier, I grew disenchanted with how expensive and inaccessible the most renowned wine is. Bourbon and rye were, in contrast, everyman’s drink but — like wine — offer the excitement of complexity and unpredictability. At Pinhook, we taste every barrel, and blend those barrels to showcase their unique character, rather than force them to conform to a pre-determined profile at a pre-set proof.”

To pay tribute to the parallels between American whiskey and Kentucky’s other celebrated export — thoroughbred horseracing — every vintage is dedicated to a promising young American racehorse. (“Pinhooking,” an old Kentucky term, refers to the speculative practice of buying weanlings and reselling them as race-ready thoroughbreds.) This year’s rye expressions feature Rye’d On, a three-year-old chestnut colt, preparing for his first start. His portrait, hand-drawn by Wall Street Journal illustrator Noli Novak, appears on the label of the newly-released Pinhook Kentucky Straight Rye, as well as the 2020 vintage’s High Proof and True Single Barrel expressions to come later this year. The brand identity and packaging were created by Pinhook co-founder Charles Fulford, who has designed digital products and campaigns for Apple, Goldman Sachs, and HBO.

According to Pinhook’s CEO, Alice Peterson (who recently joined the wave of female executives leading the whiskey industry), “2020 is the year we’ve been waiting for. By nature, authentic, small-batch whiskey requires vision and patience. Even as our category has taken off, Pinhook has continued to produce only 75 barrel batches at a time, and approach each vintage from scratch, to create a superlative blend and bottle it at the ideal proof. American whiskey drinkers have come to expect perfection, and with this very special distillate finally ready, we’re able to deliver it better than ever.”

Since its start in 2010, Pinhook has released 16 unique expressions of bourbon and rye and is now available in 24 states. In 2019, the company expanded its product portfolio to include high-proof expressions and a small single-barrel program in both bourbon and rye. Last year, Pinhook also launched the Vertical Series in both bourbon and rye, which follows a single group of barrels, bottling a new tranche annually as they age from 4 to 12 years old. With the exception of the Vertical Series, which is built on barrels Pinhook sourced from Master Grain Products Indiana (MGPI), Pinhook’s custom distillate produced at Castle & Key will be the basis for all of the expressions in the 2020 vintage and beyond.