169. Copper Fox Dawson's Reserve Bourbon Whiskey Review

Welcome to another trip down the Bourbon Road with your hosts, Jim and Mike. So grab a glass of your favorite bourbon and kick back.

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Hello, everybody. I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt.

And this is the Bourbon Road. And today, Mike, it's another Craft Distillery Monday. Yeah. We've got a brand new bottle here, and I've never heard of it before.

Never? No. I've been seeing this for a while now. It kind of piqued my interest, but I just didn't pull the trigger on it, right? I walked past it. So we were in Virginia on the road. We're up in Williamsburg, Virginia. And I saw the distillery up there just driving by. And I was like, I'm going to pull in there. They are Copper Fox Distillery. They're out of Sparriville, Virginia and Williamsburg, Virginia. Their main distillery being there. Their owner is Rick Washman. He's got a pretty neat past. He did apprenticeship for six weeks over in Balmore Distillery.

Oh, OK. Yeah.

Learning the art of floor malting. So the neat thing about this place in Williamsburg is they have malting floors there and they have a smoker there where they smoke peat and smoke all their grains. So it's very intriguing to me that they're doing all that themselves, 100% there at the distillery. Wow.

That's amazing. So, you know, this is something you don't hear about everybody doing. and these guys are doing it right there in Virginia.

Yeah, it was nice to see the process. They didn't have any malt on their malting floor, but still to me it was neat to see that they're taking that time to do that process. They're definitely, the steel was running while I was there and It's a pot steel. It was nice to see that.

So what does Vivian think about this? Every time you're driving down the road and you hit, you see the stiller, you're like, Whoa, we got to go there.

I think she's used to it now. That day she was feeling pretty good. Cause we went to a couple of breweries beforehand. So, um, I had to get a bottle from them to check it out. I thought it was very neat. They'd let us sample some. Um, it was a, it was a good experience. She, she always says she gets root benefits.

Yeah.

Whether it be a free meal or a free drink, whatever we're doing, you know, we do get pretty treated a little bit differently sometimes when we go into distillery. Sure.

Well, I mean, this bottle reads like like a recipe card, like they tell you everything that's being done to it. Yeah, they're not hiding anything. This is 100% transparency. It's a beautiful bottle, beautiful label. It's kind of like the old Forester clear bottle. It's got the name Copper Fox on it, but of course it's a gilded copper label. So it's very beautiful. But they talk about the grains used, you know, one-fifth hand-melted barley, one-fifth, that's 20%, right? Yep. Three-fifths corn, three-fifths is 60%. and one fifth wheat. So this is a weeded bourbon. You know, I like that. Yeah. So 60% corn, 20% wheat, 20% hand-malted barley. And they got some malting notes on here. They say it's a two or six row Virginia barley, medium smoke, a hundred percent peach wood. So it's a peach wood smoked barley. Wow.

It's pretty special, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Pretty interesting. Distilling notes, double pot stilled to between 150 and 160 proof and a 500 gallon mash still with 104 gallon spirit still. Aged a new 53 gallon wide oak barrels, air dried for over one year, number three char, non-chill filtered, 48 months old. I don't think in my entire history I've ever seen a bottle that goes into so much detail about how it's made.

They're not trying to hide anything. The only thing on there they don't have is the price. $62.99 at the distillery. You can find these bottles at Total Wine though, across the nation. Virginia, they have Virginia ABC stores. Sure. So, or you can stop by the distillery and pick a bottle up.

So it's a small batch whiskey. It's a bourbon whiskey and it's four years old. I'm ready to try it.

Let's do it. Wow. Is that malted barley coming out to you?

The funny thing is it's peach wood smoked, but I'm getting peach on the nose and I don't think it's from the smoking. I think it's just because of all the barley that's in it. Probably. Barley tends to give you that peach or pear note. Fresh apricot, maybe. Yeah. Wow.

I really like that nose. Very sweet.

Yeah. It's got a little bit of that corn sweetness to it.

Some people might say this has like a little funky smell to it. I don't think it is at all. I think it's that a little bit of pungent sweetness off like a peach is what I'm getting.

Yeah. I'm going to say peaches on the nose. No doubt about it. I'm not picking up smoke though, are you? Just a tad bit.

You know, and I think peach peachwood anyways, when you smoke with a fruitwood is a very light smoke. It's not overpowering like a hickory or mesquite, or it gives you that bitter smoke taste. Let's taste it. Cheers.

Here's that sweetness. Very different at what you think of.

traditional weeded bourbon or even a rye bourbon, you wouldn't get this in this.

Yeah, this reminds me a lot of like a heavily malted whiskey, either an American malt or a rye malt. It's got a lot of stone fruit, very stone fruit forward peach. I get almost like some Irish whiskey or even some scotch off of this. But again, the smoke is not, it's barely apparent, just lightly. You can almost just get it. I'm impressed. I'm very impressed.

Very light. It's not very viscous on the palate. Not any spice at all. I'm not getting a whole bunch of Virginia hug, I guess would be on this. I'm not getting that Kentucky hug real deep. Maybe it's because they did a double pot still. I can't remember if it was sweet mash. I think that's what they're doing. Sweet mash there. They're cleaning everything out.

You know, there's a lot of texture to this whiskey. It's not overly thin. It's got a little bit of stickiness to it.

You think that's because all the malting they do? You know, I think it's that pot still.

You know, that pot still just... Pot stills are magical in the way they make whiskey. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the fact that the column stills are able to really put out a lot of volume. But pot stills, they bring something historical and magical to the table and you usually find a little bit more of a... a texture component to your whiskey when it comes off of pot still. Most of the Irish whiskeys are pot still, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think pot stills are making a resurgent, especially craft distilleries, you know, across America. Heck, I mean, Balcony spent millions and millions of dollars on there for pot stills that are, I think they're 40 foot tall each. They're monstrous. This was not quite that big.

So this is 100% Virginia sourced materials. They even give kudos to the farmer. Billy Dawson, who grew the grain. I guess they're paying homage to the man who farmed the fields.

Yeah, it says on the front of the bottle, Dawson's Reserve bourbon whiskey. That's even another tribute to the man that's out there working the ground. I think Copper Fox is doing it right.

I think their whiskey is tasty. It's different. It's not exactly what you expect from a weeded bourbon. This is definitely a high malt weeded bourbon.

Yeah. If you're not into high malts, probably not for you. For me, it's something different as a whiskey nerd that I can super appreciate. To me, this gem is really a spring sipper because it's still 90 proof, right? When it comes down to it, you got those notes of peaches and apricots, like you said, that stone fruit. Very beautiful.

Now, Mike, you said this is on Total Wine. So this is available here in Kentucky.

Some of their stuff is 100% positive that bottle's available there, but you'd have to look at Total Wine and see what they have. They are a small distillery. There's no doubt about that. They're not mass producing anything. If you're in Williamsburg though, if you, you've been to Williamsburg, Virginia. Yeah. Been a while. You know, if you haven't been to Williamsburg, um, Very historical town. That's actually where I proposed to Vivian at the governor's mansion there. If you haven't been there, you should really go and check it out. Then you could go over to, it's Colonial Williamsburg. You could go over to Jamestown, see the kind of the birth of our nation right there on there. Take the Yorktown, the Colonial Parkway over to Yorktown, see the battlefields there. Do some history and go to a distillery while you're there.

Why not? Virginia has a lot of the whiskey making in the United States was birthed in Virginia, right?

Yeah. I'm positive that there was a distillery there long, long time ago. The problem there was that some of that Virginia was the start of Prohibition, you know, and once Prohibition came around. that kind of killed the whiskey industry. And then next thing you know, you got moonshiners like Tim Smith, who we had on, making moonshine. And people were trying to shut that down, the illegal moonshine operation, because people were getting sick from it, right? And Uncle Sam's not getting his tax dollars. But it's nice to see that these whiskey companies are coming out. They're making craft spirits like this right here. Absolutely. They actually had some phenomenal other bottles there. Some of them I couldn't afford. Some very high dollar bottles that are super limited releases. We got to taste some of those. They're really, really good rye. I think it was the Founders Rye. Really, really, really nice bottle.

Well, for me, I think this is definitely one you want to try if you're able to get yourself out to the distillery. If you're in Virginia, coming down from DC or from Richmond or coming up from South Carolina or North Carolina or traveling anywhere along the coast, you get a chance to pop in. I would say give it a shot. This is a good whiskey. They're doing it right. They're doing it different. They got their own malting floor. They're introducing a little bit of smoke into their barley, which is neat. A high malt bourbon is something... A weeded bourbon at that. A weeded bourbon, high malt weeded bourbon.

And I've never been to a place that had their own malting floor before. Have you? No, I haven't, but I would love to see it. I was rather fascinated that they were doing everything. They took this old motor inn, which is an old hotel, and they made it into their distillery. So one wing is the malting floors and stuff like that. And then the back, they have their smoking room. They had their barrel rooms there. Everything that you could imagine, they could fit into this old hotel they did. They used that structure in the main building, which was kind of grand back then, probably when you were driving down the road. And I think that's Route 60 that it's on. It was pretty neat to see that. That was probably a grand hotel back then.

Now, if any of our listeners are wondering what malting is, we won't go into a great bit of detail there. But basically, the idea is that you take the barley and you introduce a little bit of moisture to it, and then it sprouts. And when it sprouts, it converts a lot of the long-chain carbohydrates into sugars that are easily digestible by the yeast. They stop that sprouting process, and they toast the barley. Or in this case, they're smoking or drying the barley. And on those malting floors, that's where they do this. So they take that barley. Barley is kind of a special thing. It's got a special enzyme in it that sort of jump starts the fermentation process. And it's absolute necessity. You'll see it in just about every mash builder is.

The only thing I wish they would have had one master distiller there, so this would have been a bottle and bond at 48 months old. I mean, hey.

It's good whiskey. It's a great whiskey. It's definitely one that I'd be proud to have on my shelf and share with my friends.

Yeah. As I've sipped on this, I was going to say a very slight medium finish, but not say a medium finish on this.

Yeah, about a medium finish on it.

A good buy, 62 bucks, not a bad price for a craft distillery. If you're a big military region there, every branch there from the army has a base there. The air force has a base. One of the largest Coast Guard bases in the U.S. Actually, two of them, you got Yorktown and then you got Portsmouth. Monstrous Navy force in the Hampton Roads area, right?

Right. Absolutely.

Marine Corps there. You got a little bit of everything for military. If you're in the military, you're one of our listeners, make sure you stop by there. Yeah. All right, Michael, where can people find us? You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, whatever else is out there. You can find us. Just, just Google us. We'll pop right up.

We've got a private Facebook group called the The Bourbon Roadies where we've got about 1800 or so members now. Yeah. Just like family, we'd love to share what we're sipping on, share life events, hang out, talk whiskey with each other. We would share whiskey. Just a tad bit. Just a little bit of whiskey.

You want to make sure you're in that bourbon roadies or you're following us on Instagram though, because we do do some giveaways. Make sure you check in those giveaways out, participate. That's the only way you're going to get something from me or Jim, if you participate. Absolutely. So make sure you do that. We do have a giveaway going on. It's coming up with Old Salt Coffee Company. coffee, two coffee cups that say all salt on them, because that's kind of tribute to me and you, just two old dudes that had some naval history, right? And then we're going to pair that with a Buffalo Trace bourbon cream bottle. So look for that. Um, enter to win, play along, join a group, have a good time.

All right. Well, we do two shows a week. We do a short episode like this every Monday, called our Craft Distillery Monday episodes, about 15 minutes or so. Every Wednesday we'll do a long version. Uh, we'll have a guest on, we'll visit a distillery. We'll do more, a little bit more of a deep dive on a subject. You make sure you check out both those shows every week. We'd love to hear what you think about it. If you've got some ideas on who we should have on, some bottles we ought to review, like Copper Fox, if that's your local distillery and you want to give them a shout out, you just let Mike and I know. We'll see if we can't get them on and review their whiskey. Let us know. You can reach out to me on Instagram at jshannon63. I'm One Big Chief, and we'll see you down in the bourbon room. You know, you can't drink whiskey without glassware and Mike and I are extremely pleased to have a sponsor like premium bar products. Premium bar products offers direct to consumer, the finest whiskey glasses, cocktail glasses, and bar tools with your own personal engraving. I mean, you can write anything you want on these glasses, anything from a company logo to a personal statement. And there are no minimum orders. Their direct consumer platform offers you the opportunity to purchase small quantities of your favorite glass shapes that enhance the pleasure of enjoyment and drinking a whiskey and make it all very positive. They offer the absolute finest trending and handmade classes as well as a comprehensive range of styles and all of their items have been designed with purpose, practicality and longevity in mind. So if you're a bourbon or whiskey group and you need custom logos, you need to reach out to premium bar products. If you're an individual, you just want a few for your bar to impress your friends, to give out as gifts, you need to call Premium Bar Products. They need to be your one and only source for custom glassware. I can tell you right now, the Bourbon Road, that's who we use. Janie and Carson and the team there at Premium Bar Products will take care of you. They'll treat you like family and they'll take care of you with every order.