America’s premier luxury rye distillers WhistlePig reveal their most innovative whiskey yet…
It’s barely past nine a.m. and the temperatures at the Radford Racing school outside Phoenix are already eclipsing triple digits. The smooth blacktop appears to be cracking before our eyes, but it’s all good — it’s a dry heat. Veteran automotive T.V. hosts Chris Jacobs (Discovery) and Cristy Lee (ESPN, SPEED, MotorTrend, etc.) have just spent the last half-hour lighting up the skid pad in a most curious vehicle: the WhistlePig Dodge Hellcat. Onlookers whoop it up as their twirling donut dance gushes volumes of white smoke into the morning air. The shenanigans, and torque, are dialled up to eleven.
This is no ordinary Hellcat mind you, it’s the WhistlePig edition — modified to run not on pure petroleum, but fuel of another sort altogether: premium rye whiskey. Vinyl-wrapped with bowtied pigs, barrels, wood, and all things cooperage, the gurgling muscle car draws stares wherever it rumbles.
“We took 10-year WhistlePig Rye and it had to go through three additional distillations to get it to like 99% ABV,” explains WhistlePig’s Chief Marketing Officer Jason Newell of the unorthodox petrol. “After multiple distillations and another process to increase the ABV, it’s super pure — so our partners at VP Racing fuels were able to engineer a performance fuel mixture to play with.”
“Well, if you’re going to distill the whiskey into fuel, why not just use straight-up white dog off the still?” I yell over the din of supercharged V8s. “Why use a whiskey that’s spent a decade aging in a barrel?” Jason blinks, as if teaching quantum theory to a two-yearold. “Because it’s WhistlePig,” he says flatly, “and we wanted to use aged whiskey.”
While Newell admits the whiskey-fuelled Hellcats are just for show, tire-shredding ornamentation for this epic journey, the actual RoadStock “rolling rickhouse” behind him is anything but. Inside the sprawling Class 8 semi, 80 barrels of WhistlePig slosh about, the flagship whiskey that put America’s premier luxury rye label on the map. Half the whiskey is stored in WhistlePig barrels, and half in barrels supplied by the Jordan Winery in Sonoma County, CA.
We’re here to document this adventure that’s taking the whiskey aging inside the semi from Vermont all the way to Central California, to the Firestone Walker brewery. There the juice within will be disgorged and transferred into Firestone Walker barrels, and WhistlePig’s barrels will be gifted to the famed Paso Robles craft brewery. Firestone will then use the newly acquired whiskey-soaked American white oak to age their beer, while the RoadStock rolling rickhouse will U-turn and head back to Vermont. All in all the whiskey will cross America two times, in five distinct barrels: WhistlePig’s own, Jordan Vineyard’s cabernet/merlot blend, and three Firestone Walker beers: Bravo Imperial Brown Ale, Helldorado Blonde Barley Wine, and a handful of Parabola Imperial Stouts.
“All these barrels, with the sloshing around, the elevation changes, the extreme temperature changes, all affect the aging process,” WhistlePig Chief Blender Meghan Ireland will explain to me later. “There’s an interplay between wood, climate, et cetera. That’s all being played with, so over the 6,000-something miles you’re creating a very unique aging situation and environment.”
The level of creative experimentation should not be a surprise, given RoadStock is part of WhistlePig’s ambitious LTO (Limited Time Offering) program, one built on the soil of rigorous exploration. “LTOs give me a chance to have some fun and experiment,” continues Ireland, a trained chemical engineer and the person at WhistlePig most responsible for the Dr. Bunsen Honeydew-like R&D department. “When you’re given the freedom to color outside the lines the results can be groundbreaking, and I think our past successes prove that.”
This sense of innovation dates all the way back to WhistlePig’s launch in 2007 and the brand’s early commitment to playing with unexpected wood. Their acclaimed barrel program has already been responsible for innovative ryes finished in casks of Calvados, Cachaça, Madeira, Sauternes and even Umeshu, a Japanese plum wine.
So what inspired RoadStock, you might ask? Quite simply the global zeitgeist. “We were thinking about what’s going on in this moment in time,” Eliza McClure, VP of Marketing & Innovation, reveals . “We’re just coming out of COVID, people are just starting to travel again, and there’s this huge resurgence for the American cross-country road trip.” Considering the brand’s authentic connection with automotive culture — WhistlePig recently sold Barrel No. 0001 of their FarmStock Rye Beyond Bonded at a Mecum car auction (100% of proceeds went to Farm Aid), and they are a racing partner of IMSA and have held tastings at vintage car events — the idea materialised before their eyes.
“It all came together in this concept of let’s take the whiskey on the road,” McClure continues. “So we created this giant ‘rolling rickhouse’ semi truck, loaded it up with barrels and thought, What’s the most classic American road trip? It’s the cross country journey over Route 66, from Vermont to California. Which also coincidentally happened to be the home of our partners for the barrel finishing.”
“Honestly, it’s such a unique aging process,” Distiller Mitch Mahar tells me over Zoom just after they began bottling the final RoadStock blend. “I went into it with a wide-eyed curiosity of, What’s going to happen when we do this? Because other distilleries have done the whole aging across the ocean thing, some have made big temperature swings in their rickhouse, this, that and the other. But we organically had a really dynamic aging process. You can’t duplicate it; there’s no way that we could really do this twice.”
It’s been well over a month since I’ve seen Mitch’s amiable mustachioed face squinting in the California sun as we headed from the Arizona racing school to Paso Robles. Since returning to Vermont he’s been sequestered in the lab, mixing and blending these 80 barrels with Chief Blender Ireland to try to find the exact right formula to create the very best RoadStock.
“One of the fears I had, especially given some of the big temperature swings in the Southwest, was that some of the flavours from the cask would lead to over-extraction,” he notes. “But overall everything came across really nice and subtle and floral. It’s a really delicate whiskey. I thought I was going to get a sort of brash younger brother of a whiskey, but instead we ended up with something way more elegant.”
Which reminds me of something Newell told me on that torrid Arizona blacktop as the WhistlePig Hellcat twirled smoky rubber donuts around us: “We’re always experimenting, and sometimes it doesn’t go as planned,” he admitted, smiling. “Ninety-five times out of a hundred the finish is amazing, that’s where the magic happens. But as we joke around at WhistlePig: at least we get to drink our mistakes.” ■
By NICOLAS STECHER
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