MIC.DROP. L20-01
4yr Old Straight Rye Whiskey
MIC.DROP. L20-01 STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY
The Idea Behind the 2020 Mic.Drop Release:
By September 15th of 2019, we had sold out Mic.Drop. 4 Year in less than two weeks time and could have easily sold twice as much if the inventory existed. In my head, I thought “wow, we may have something here...gotta keep going, this is cool”. That’s when the pressure was on. I didn’t want to mess up – I felt I may have something that is as close to a “brand” as I’ve ever had...but maybe it was just a fluke.
My main question at the time was whether or not there were really that many people who wanted to buy a bottle, or if it was just a handful of folks hoarding the stuff to resell on the secondary market. Not that I cared that much whether or not someone would be making ten times our margin reselling, but it mattered in order to understand the big picture.
At the time, I had these thoughts comparing the modest third release of our bourbon to a band that had been playing in front of a crowd of a dozen people for years, then arrives one evening to a tiny venue they were scheduled to perform at to see a line of people out the door, too many to fit inside. It brings a sense of pride along with disbelief – “oh cool but...why?” The small room is packed and the concert goes well, people seem happy for the most part. In the days that followed, some local critics started to comment and praise the band. It was the first time they had been written up in the press.
Now the band feels it needs to come up with a 2020 album and the pressure is on. The album might be successful – that would be awesome. Or it could completely backfire because, well, the band doesn’t exactly know what made them so popular to begin with. And trying to force that magic often yields disappointing results.
This is our 2020 album. But we went about it with a different mindset than the past releases.
Search and Select
The easy route would have been to keep selecting casks from MGP in Indiana as they consistently produce quality juice. But that runs the risk of becoming boring for everyone – for us, for retailers, for consumers. It would be hard for us to genuinely display a sense of excitement if the obvious, driving force behind the release was to simply capitalize on the success of the past ones. And it would be hard to convince consumers that the Mic.Drop project had not lost some of its swagger and remained as forward thinking as it originally was.
Mic.Drop was essentially born from a need for PM Spirits to be able to offer a bourbon in the New York market while also bringing something exciting to the table that would be enjoyable on the kind of day where the hustle and grind becomes a lot and one needs something spirit-lifting. So now the question we were faced with was this: how do we keep the momentum going while keeping it genuinely fresh, interesting, and cool for all parties involved?
Here’s the thing – as most of you reading this know, Mic.Drop/PM Spirits does not actually produce anything. We don’t grow fruit or grain, we don’t ferment, we don’t distill. What we do is carefully select things that we think taste great and are in line with our ethos. We are able to pick barrels because of the work of the gifted and truly talented people out there who rolled the dice on building a distillery and investing money in equipment, raw material, and labor. The people who set about making the best product they possibly can so they feel proud to put their name on the label.
So we thought – perhaps selfishly – that it would be cool to have a reason to travel around, seeing the people we admire and meeting new people to find dope booze to “drop the mic” on, if they’d be inclined to let us pick some of their barrels.
Wilderness Trail
Distilleries
So now we had a concept. What comes next? Well, it’s good to have friends. After a little less than a decade in the booze (mostly brandy) business, I have been very fortunate to cross paths with individuals who not only are very good at what they do, but are also fantastic people at heart.
Among them are Michael Cherner and Chris Schmid who run DC/MD/DE’s top wholesale operation, Prestige-Ledroit, Bill Thomas from Jack Rose Dining Saloon in DC, and Jared Hyman, owner of The Bourbon Source. Mike and Chris have been extremely kind over the years, believing in what PM was trying to do early on and always supported our efforts. They are among the people without whom, PM would not be around today.
Thanks to them, I got the privilege to meet and hang with Bill and Jared and started to get schooled on American Whisky. These four guys, among other things, introduced me six or seven years ago to a distillery I had never heard of...something called “Willett”. Maybe you know it.
Turns out that the folks in this small DC group – which also includes the legendary Jake Parrott, Sales Manager for Haus Alpenz – were the earliest champions of WIllett’s Family Estate single barrel program and built a bedrock of quality expectations for the whole region through their dozens of barrel picks with them. From the first day I got to drink that sort of whiskey, I was hooked, and when those guys mentioned they were going to pick barrels in July 2019 and asked if I wanted to come along, I was elated.
That short trip was incredible; first we visited Peerless and Willett. Met the good people, tasted the great barrels. Then we took the car and headed to a place in Danville that the crew was raving about, Wilderness Trail. Sure, why not?
On site, I was blown away by the approach, the attention to detail, and the whole fermentation aspect that these guys had completely mastered. And the spirit...The wheated barrels were unctuous and elegant, the high rye bourbon barrels felt precise and dynamic on the palate, and the ryes were just stunners. Sitting in the tasting room, I remember how impressively mouth coating those rye samples were. Sweet mash perfection, over four years old. Eye-opening to say the least.
Wilderness Trail felt like it would be a super solid contender for a first Mic.Drop release, should they agree. When I asked for Jared’s opinion a few weeks later, he felt that picking rye casks would be dope and suggested that blending them would be unique, as the distillery releases its rye as single barrels.
So on paper, we had a Mic.Drop Rye release. The only thing that needed to be addressed was actually meeting the Wilderness Trail guys, having a conversation, and hoping that conversation would have a positive outcome. Thankfully, Shane and Pat are awesome dudes and felt it would be mutually beneficial to collaborate. The distillery had never sold aged whiskey to anyone, but they were willing to make an exception in this case and let me pick five casks of four+ year old rye.
This process took a bit of an unexpected turn in March when COVID-19 changed everything. No traveling meant no visiting the barrels to blend, so the barrels came to me in the form of small samples. I tasted the samples not thinking about their individual characteristics, but rather what would the resulting blend taste like. Macauley and Pat from Wildernesss Trail tasted along with me on their end.
The blend of samples I7, I9, H1, H8 and H11 was great, but just a tad too hot on both the nose and palate. At 110 proof it would open up over the course of 20 minutes in the glass and show its full potential, but I felt it needed a little water to blossom. The Wilderness Trail team was on the same page, so we agreed to proof the blend down a tiny bit to 108, which felt optimal.
On the packaging:
Our Heroine - Illustrated by Chris Batista
Not much has changed visually except for one tweak. After the release of 2019’s Mic Drop, I brought a few bottles home to drink and possibly give away to friends. My two young daughters were looking at the artwork (designed by the talented William Bahan) and without realizing these bottles were all the same product, asked “Daddy, why is it always a boy on these bottles?” So that was that – this powerful rye whiskey deserved a woman on the label.
I hope you enjoy it.
Sweet Mash Mashbill 56% rye, 33% corn, 11% barley malt
Alc. by Vol.: 54%
Origin: Danville, KY
Distilled at Wilderness Trail Distillery, Danville, KY in Dec, 2015
Bottled at Wilderness Trail Distillery, Danville, KY in September, 2020
No chill-filtration
Consisting of 5 casks of rye from ricks N18H1, N18H8, N18H11, N18I7, and N18I9 dumped together it yielded 1500 bottles.
SOLD OUT!
Mic.Drop. L20-01
