By Richard Thomas Rating: A- Yesterday I was observing that even though craft whiskey has been a thing for at least a decade, there are almost no examples of a micro-distilled whiskey that is even several years old, let alone ten. In fact, the only one I can think of is Old Potrero Hotaling’s series, a periodic line of limited ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B The craft movement is now 10 to 12 years old, but even the earliest entrants haven’t introduced whiskeys several years or a decade old. This is because most of those early micro-distilleries were using barrels so small that aging even a year would leave the whiskey cloyingly over-oaked. Those that weren’t relying exclusively on small ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B Ironically, Jack Daniel’s introduction of a Bottled In Bond version of their Tennessee Whiskey, billed as a testimony to the heritage of the brand, also points directly to how the Bottled In Bond Act of 1897 is something of a dusty antique. Jack Daniel’s introduced its iconic square bottle in 1895, and the Progressive Era ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ Anchor Distilling’s (now Hotaling & Co.) Old Portero is craft whiskey before there was craft whiskey, predating the movement we know today by almost two decades. However, it took the explosion of small distillers for Old Potrero to pursue brand expansions. After all, you need to know a market is there. Old Potrero 18th Century ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B- One of the things I like to warn folks about is just because someone has a blog does not mean she knows what she’s blogging about. Even some who work as journalists and produce paid work for mainstream publications sometimes have a depressing inability to separate their opinions from fact or distinguish what they actually ...