I’m a Discord user and in one of the (relatively) few servers I’m active in, Night Shift Writers (an excellent server if you’re looking for a writing-based one) did a Secret Santa thing over the holidays and having expressed my love for all things whiskey and whiskey related I was beyond delighted to receive a bottle of Stranahan’s Single Malt from my Secret Santa.
Right off the bat, I found something I liked about Stranahan’s Single Malt: it comes with its own measuring shot. It’s silver and fits neatly over the top of the bottle. If you don’t already have your own, it’s incredibly helpful. If you do have your own (as I do) it’s kind of extraneous, but props to them for giving you something that could be potentially helpful. (Digging into their wiki page, I found another explanation: the metal cap is inspired by an old barroom practice of covering bottles with tin cups with the corks dry out.)
Stranahan’s has a nice, comprehensive website and in terms of interesting tidbits about the company, I was surprised to learn that they’ve been around for a while. Founded by Jess Graber and George Stranahan, who met when Graber a volunteer firefighter was fighting a fire at Stranahan’s barn in 1998, they started chatting about whiskey and soon were in business together. Founded in 2004, Stranahan’s was one of the first craft whiskey distillers in the US, Colorado’s first microdistillery, and the state’s first legal distillery since Prohibition.
Let’s talk tasting notes:
Color: Looks fairly dark and amber in color initially- shades of maple syrup here, but when you hold it up to the light, it’s got a nice goldenrod hue to it.
Nose: There’s something unique here that I couldn’t quite unpack— looking around, it seems like they do a lot of aging in charred oak barrels, so there’s a nice woody tone here that I wanted to call oak- but there’s a sweetness as well that I want to call brown sugar.
Body: Well-balanced with a nice, peppery spice that dances across the tongue. It’s not a harsh spice at all.
Finish: Woody spice, with a sudden warming sensation, but not harsh.
(In an illustration of how subjective tasting notes can be, compare and contrast my take with this one. We agree on the unique aspect of the nose, but other than that not much else. Which either means my nose is shit- which, given my allergies, I can’t rule out or I drank a very different whiskey.)
Overall: The nose on this one is unique enough it stands out and when I drink whiskey, I’m always looking for things that stand out or that I haven’t tasted before, so props for that. Is this as smooth as I might prefer? No, it’s not- but, it’s not harsh either. It’s solid, drinkable, and different. And for that, I’m going to give it My Grade of *** out of ****