Origin: Illinois (USA)
Type: American Straight Bourbon
Strength: 46.5%ABV
Ageing casks: Toasted Virgin
Chillfiltered: No
Added coloring: No
Owner: FEW Spirits
Average price: € 80.00
Official website: www.fewspirits.com
Vote: 85/100
After talking to one of the whisky makers, Erin Lee, it was time to try some of the products of FEW Spirits, a craft distillery in a suburb of Chicago.
Paul Hletko, with a rather varied background from guitarist to lawyer, founded the distillery in 2011 in Evanston, a place well known in the United States for being the birthplace of Prohibition and of the one who gave birth to the moralizing movement at its origin, Francis Elizabeth Willard, whose initials are ironically found in the name of its products.
Hletko’s family had a brewery before World War II in what later became the Czech Republic, and although the rest of the family was exterminated in the concentration camps, the dream of reopening the business never abandoned his grandfather, the only survivor.
With illustrations on the label recalling the World Fair, held in Chicago in 1893, the distillery produces both gin and whiskey, using local raw materials and with a style that harks back to pre-Prohibitionism: here you can find an interview with the founder conducted some time ago by Whisky Club Italia.
Today I’m trying one of the distillery’s most original products, a bourbon (Straight, of course) made from a 70% corn, 20% rye and 10% malted barley mash with three days of fermentation, cutted before bottling not with water but with Cold Brew, the coffee obtained by letting ground coffee steep in cold water for about a whole day. According to Hletko, roughly the equivalent of one cup of coffee per bottle.
Tasting notes
The nose is spicier than one would expect from a bourbon, with nutmeg and cinnamon punctuating the smoothness of the crème caramel along with nuts (roasted hazelnut and peanuts), liquorice, brown sugar, coffee candy, chocolate, and cooked corn. The sweet coffee part becomes more intense over time, going far beyond mere suggestion. Perfect strength.
The palate has a good creaminess, in which the coffee component becomes more important while remaining well integrated with the other flavours. The spices return, with a touch of black pepper, on tones that become darker and more roasted, with incursions of Catalan cream, sweet liquorice, macadamia nut, dehydrated coconut, a slight balsamic inflection.
The fairly long finish brings back the spicy and roasted notes of coffee, chocolate, nuts, caramel.
It is difficult to ignore the expectations that this label inevitably produces, but the cold brew proves to be less impactful than expected, enhancing those coffee notes often found in bourbon. The end result is balanced and persistent, the distillate emerges with good texture in a very satisfying dram.