By Richard Thomas Rating: B- OOLA is a stylishly designed micro-distillery located in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, started in 2010 by an artist and art dealer named Kirby Kallas-Lewis. Their Waitsburg Bourbon started out as a blend of sourced and in-house whiskeys, but nowadays it’s all in-house. It’s a wheated bourbon, aged for five years in standard, 53-gallon barrels. The ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ In the hullabaloo surrounding the launch of the Barrell Craft Spirits (BCS) line of super premium whiskeys, it might be forgivable to overlook that their normal, well-established lines of spirits continue. The main case in point is the most recent Barrell Bourbon, now in its seventeenth batch. Barrell Bourbon Batch 017 is billed as a ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ With nearly everything closed on Monday and Tuesday, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I was stuck with some strolling in a local nature park (which is always open from dawn to dusk), writing and catching up on Vikings to occupy myself between family engagements. And what better to pair with Ivar the Boneless’s psychopathy than ...

By Emma Briones Rating: B- There is a new whisky in Compass Box’s core range. It is called The Story of The Spaniard and, you guessed right, it has a Spanish accent. This new whisky was born from John Glaser’s experience in Spain a long time ago, when the Compass Box founder and whisky-maker traveled around the south of Spain, ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ Introduced in 2017, Stranahan’s Sherry Cask is the latest offering in regular release from the Colorado distillery, and they didn’t spare the flub-dubs in making it. They started with their four year old single malt and gave it a finish in properly seasoned (four decades) Oloroso Sherry butts. None of that “Sherry casks made for ...