‘Distilling Has Always Been in Our Blood’: High West’s Debut Bottled-In-Bond Whiskey Was a Long Time in The Making
High West’s journey from a blending house to a bottled-in-bond release was many years in the making. (Photo: High West)
High West Master Distiller Brendan Coyle thinks of the Park City, Utah distillery’s whiskeys to paintings. Each barrel of whiskey is like a different color, and the more colors you have, the more complicated and layered the final painting turns out to be.
Indeed, with all of its intricate blends, complex mashbills and fascinating finishes, High West is turning whiskey into art in its own right.
The brand started as a blending house in 2006, founded by David and Jane Perkins. Its flagship whiskey, Rendezvous Rye, was a blend of two different whiskeys ranging from 6 to 16 years old, one of which was sourced from Indiana’s distilling powerhouse, MGP. Rendezvous Rye made our list of the 8 Best Rye Whiskeys For Beginners, which you can find here.
Yet, despite the brand’s success with blending, the team at High West Distillery has greater ambitions for its whiskeys and is looking for more homemade colors to add to its repertoire.
High West released a Bottled-In-Bond rye whiskey in February. The release is a darling among the team at the distillery and symbolizes a capstone moment for the brand, since producing a Bottled-In-Bond whiskey requires a distiller to jump through some hoops.
We spoke to Isaac Winter, the brand’s distilling manager, about the journey High West took from blending into bonded whiskey.
From Blending to Bottled-In-Bond: How High West Took its Distillate to New Heights
Winter shared that High West has been making its own distillate as far back as a year after its inception.
“We started producing our own whiskey, Valley Tan, in 2007. And that’s from the still in the saloon which came from the original teeny tiny warehouse. So distilling has always been in our blood,” Winter explained. “I think it’s fair to say that we made our name on being a blending house. In my mind, the move to producing and the move to focusing on using our own distillate in our blends — it fits.”
The brand began incorporating some of its own rye distillate into its blends in January 2018, according to Winter. Once the distillery began using its own juice, the critics started to take notice.
“I’m going to toot my own horn a bit, and we saw a score increase from Whisky Advocate, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so cool!'” Winter said.
After the team celebrated the bump in critical acclaim, they began to see the possibilities emerge. Winter said that since the High West team didn’t have a lot of whiskey to work with, they wanted it to be “really, really impactful” with plenty of “sharp edges.” High West’s distillate afforded the brand the new luxury of being able to experiment with more “colors” in its final blends.
“The thing about blending is using all the colors of the painter’s palate, so that rings true here,” Winter said.
As the years progressed and the brand grew, Winter and his colleagues — High West Director of Sensory and New Product Development Tara Lindley and Master Distiller Brendan Coyle — began to consider how to best utilize High West’s rye distillate.
“All of a sudden we were seeing the edges smooth out and the balance come into where it should be, and it became a conversation with Tara, Brendan and I, where we said, ‘This blend is good enough on its own. How can we showcase it the best?'” Winter explained. “And so Bottled-In-Bond was a logical next step because for me it’s sort of — apart from cask strength — it’s as pure as it can get out of the barrel without adding anything to it. It’s higher proof, and we were just really proud of what we were putting together and the fact that it could stand on its own.”
For a whiskey to achieve Bottled-in-Bond classification, it must be aged in a federally bonded warehouse under the supervision of the U.S. Government for a minimum of four years, bottled at 100 proof, and be the product of one distiller at one distillery during a single distilling season. Since its release, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive.
“I think that it’s been really fun for our team here who has been producing whiskey forever as a blender to now see [our whiskey] stand on its own. It’s something that’s sort of like a feather in all their caps,” Winter said. “It’s been awesome to release a Bottled-in-Bond and see that be so well received by the public.”
On the bourbon side, Winter divulged that High West’s distillate isn’t ready for bottling yet but has been maturing since early 2020.
“I think bringing more custom whiskey is going to be awesome from a blending standpoint,” Winter mused. “It’s going to be great for our distillers to bring new ideas to the table and say, ‘You know what Campfire needs? It needs a low-rye mashbill, high-rye mashbill, whatever…’ So, I think the increased focus on the customization of our blending threads with our capabilities on site.”
Winter’s personal passions seemed aligned with the release of High West’s proprietary bourbon, and when he began discussing what he was the most excited about for the brand’s future from a distilling perspective, bourbon was on his brain.
“I think that the High West bourbon from our own distillate is going to be splashy. I think it represents this new massive flavor we have to play with that we haven’t before,” Winter shared. “We’ve got a number of different mashbills, a number of different yeast strains and this huge array of different characters to play with in the inventory so from a blending standpoint and a product creation standpoint that’s like this massive thing I’m excited about.”
When asked about a prospective Bottled-In-Bond bourbon release, Winter came off coy – but it appears to be a possibility.
“With the bourbon, we’ve been tasting it; it’s not quite there yet. It needs to develop a bit more,” the distilling manager said.
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