Skip to main content

Stranahan's Sherry Cask Single Malt Whiskey

Founded in 2004, Stranahan's was an early comer to the craft distilling scene, and the first microdistillery to open in Colorado. Stranahan's is named for co-founder George Stranahan, notably also a co-founder of Flying Dog Brewery, which went so far as to provide all the wash for the distillery until adequate brewing equipment could be procured. The distillery was acquired, in 2010, by Proximo Spirits, notable for their distribution of Jose Cuervo in the United States along with ownership of several other "premium" alcohol brands.

Stranahan's produce a range of Single Malts, each with different finishing characteristics, including the annual, unique "Snowflake" release available for only one day each year. Today I'm trying the Sherry Cask Finish; this is batch 2 (out of 3, so far), it is non chill-filtered, given an age statement of 4 years, finished in Oloroso Sherry casks, and finally bottled at 94 proof.

The malt pours a muted yellow-gold with emerald highlights. Big, playful fruit snack cup nose; cherries, mandarin orange slices, even some granny smith appleright down to that satisfying acidic snapand all this fringed with a deeper, duskier oxidative character from the sherry. Nose closes out with oak tannin, cinnamon bark, and marzipan candies. Palate is supple and generous, herbal and medicinal in the sense of Cherry Heering and throat lozenges, but also sweet and rich with notes of dried apricot and strawberries splashed with vanilla and cooking sherry, finally falling off into mulled wines with a drying, wood dominated finish. The result is total transportation to the family kitchen: desert is being prepared after the holiday dinner, the good wine from earlier still coats your throat while you sneak samples of the homemade frosting and nibble on the leftover fruits. Maybe you're even thinking about a small slice of the brandied fruit cake that distant aunt insists on sending every year, served with a slip of desert wine from that dusty bottle in the back of the cupboard. You've got a case of the winter sniffles though, so your parents fish a bag of those pricey, all-natural cough drops out of the medicine cabinet and you take one now and two for laterthe fruit cake will have to wait for tomorrow morning.

Enjoy my work? Consider buying me a coffee beer on Ko-Fi

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Teeling Single Grain Whiskey

Teeling Whiskey, located in Dublin, Ireland, are a part of the new craft distilling scene emerging in Irish Whiskey, though, as per usual, they claim a heritage of distilling dating back to 1782. Distilling operations at Teeling began in 2015, though the company started in 2012. With Master Distiller Alex Chasko, an American ex-pat formerly of Bridgeport Brewery, in Portland, OR, Teeling have been racking up awards for their range of Irish Whiskeys, including a "Small Batch" corn/barley blend, a Single Malt (100% barley), and this "Single Grain," which is 95% corn and 5% barley. Doing the math on a 5 year matured product, bottled in 2015 means this batch is all sourced barrels, with no information available on where from, though Teeling's website states that it was column distilled. The copy on the bottle indicates that the spirit was aged in ex-wine casks, apparently California Cabernet Sauvignon, and further finished in ex-rum barrels for 6 months, a relativel

Indianola Distilling Ivy Mountain Appalachian Corn Whiskey

There's a bit of a complicated story behind this 6 year old corn whiskey. Carlos Lovell (profiled here ), a lifelong moonshiner from Mount Airy, GA distilled this whiskey after finally going legit in 2012 and opening Ivy Mountain Distillery. The whiskey, made with a recipe developed by Lovell's family over a 150 year legacy of moonshining in Northern Georgia, contains hickory cane, white dent corn, rye, malted barley, and malted corn. In 2015, the Indianola Distilling company, based in Houston, acquired the remaining barrel stock of Appalachian Corn Whiskey, and are now blending and bottling the "Heirloom" whiskey under the Ivy Mountain name. This product alongside a peach brandy also purchased from Ivy Mountain are limited stock and will presumably be discontinued when the barrels run out. The whiskey pours a slightly hazy amber yellow. The nose is bright and sweet, with a floral, minty finish; hints of dill and oily caramel lend an old-school, appalachian qualit

The Arran Malt 18 Years Old & The Arran Malt Amarone Cask Finish

For something a little different this week, I'm going to do a side-by-side with two products from The Arran distillery in Lochranza on the Isle of Arran. The distillery opened in 1995 and has operated continuously since then; unusually, it remains independently owned and operated. The two products I'll be sampling today are an unpeated 18 year old single malt whisky and an Amarone cask finished single malt with no age statement. For those unfamiliar with the wine, Amarone is a kind of dry, red Italian wine, produced in Valpolicella out of dried grapes. The drying of the grapes concentrates the sugars and flavors in the grape and produces a strong (15% and up) and distinctly flavored wine. Production of Amarone is painstaking and risky and the resulting wine is comparatively rare and expensive. The Arran Malt 18 year old is sherry cask finished and bottled at 92 proof. The malt pours a clear yellow with gilded highlights. First lifting the glass, it's quite soft on the nos