318. Hard Truth Sweet Mash Rye 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.

Well, you know who likes to give back to their community is one of our sponsors, Jim. Chris Cruz from Cruz Customs Flags. He does custom flags out of bourbon barrels. Not only does that, he do that, but he's also using veterans to build those flags with. I've got one right behind me, Jim. I know you got one on your bar. Beautifully handcrafted, repurposing a bourbon barrel, not throwing it away, not making it into smoking chips, making a piece of Americana, right?

Something that'll last probably quite a few years longer than a bourbon barrel would, right?

Not only that, but he's using veterans to build those pieces of art with. You know, you gotta love that. But he's also giving back to his community at all times, helping veterans out like ourselves. He is really in tune to that. Go check his site out, cruisecustomsflags.com. You can buy his flags on there, key holders. Heck, Jim's got some of these neat little cups that are charred inside made out of oak that you can put a cocktail in.

They call those the whiskey grail, don't they?

Yeah, that is, it kind of reminds you, you know, when you think of a grail, but truly a whiskey grail right there. Go check those out at Cruise Customs Flags. Purchased from this guy, veteran owned, veteran operated, making a veteran built product.

Hello, everybody. I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt. This is The Bourbon Road. And today, Mike has another Craft Distillery Monday. We're sitting out at Jeff the Bin Farm. You know, it's November and it's 75 degrees outside.

It was nice today. It was a nice day.

You know, it's one of those days where you expect to drink a rye, but then the weather turns warm like this. You're like, oh, maybe rye is not the right thing today. But today we do have a rye on the shelf.

Yeah. I mean, to me, it's a good day to sit and drink rye because you can drink whiskey instead of raking leaves. Because yesterday, the wind was blowing like 40 miles per hour, and it just shoved all the leaves to one area of my property. And I was like, well, I don't have to get rid of all those leaves now. So you just go out with a mower and just Chop them up. Chop them up. Mulch them up. I don't rake a single leaf.

You gotta mulch them. Mulch them.

Puts nutrients back into the earth.

Yeah, absolutely. You gotta get it just right.

If you let it rain too much before they... You can't do that. Yeah. We haven't had much rain anyway. That's true.

It's almost a drought here, but it's not a drought in our glass today. We've got a wonderful rye out of Indiana, out of the Hard Truth Distilling Company in Brown County, Indiana. Now we've actually talked about this. but not on an episode.

Yeah, we've reviewed one of the other whiskeys. We reviewed that whiskey, not this sweet mash right here. So this is their sweet mash rye right here. It is a 94.6%. So 94% rye, 6% malted barley. So a high rye mash bill.

High rye rye mash bill. Yeah, that's high. Now, this is 100% produced, distilled, and bottled in the Hard Truth Distillery in Brown County, Indiana. And we've talked about Brown County on the show before.

Yeah. You know, those areas, every state has a little area, right? To where you can kind of go like Christmas shopping. I know Bronson, Missouri, that's an area people go to. They have those kind of shops, Christmas shop, Gatlinburg's kind of that area. Well, Indiana's little area.

is Nashville, Indiana. Brown County in Nashville. And they've got a great state park there. They've got a nice little main street with a ton of shops, like you said, Christmas shops and craft shops and a lot of rock shops and things like that. Just great stuff. A lot of beef jerky, too. Brewery. Breweries, wineries, and now distilleries. And a great place to get a little bed and breakfast and spend a day and a couple of days and a night. And just so happens, just outside of town. Hard Truth Distillery has built a destination distillery.

Yeah, and we've talked about that before. Now this bottle right here, Jim, this is batch number five, comes in at 116.6 proof. A little over three years old. There's 30 barrels in this batch. If people were wondering how big a batch is, you usually don't see batches like this at 116.6. So that's nice to see.

Yeah, this is a nice high proof. And the whiskey's dark. Fairly dark. Yeah. Because we know this ages in somewhere around the three-year mark. Maybe a little bit more. I call that a dark honey is what I'd call it. Definitely a dark honey. Beautiful bottle.

It's an embossed bottle. Kind of a throwback bottle. Yeah. This would be one of those bottles, you know, a lot of people wonder why people out West love like Crown Royal so much. And the reason why is because that Crown Royal bottle is flat enough to slide up under your pickup seat. Did you know that? Oh, there you go. And wear it in your saddlebag if you're on horse. Or if you're on a saddlebag. But this right here is one of those, it's kind of a, if you would take a bullet bottle and stretch it out at the top, this was, would be that style bottle. It's kind of flat.

They put hand grips on it too.

Oh yeah. It does have some hand grips on it. Super nice bottle. I like when you see these old bottles like this. It says distilled with the finest grains and waters by Indiana's sweet mash pioneers. That says something. They're proud of their product there. And I like to see that. They're not buying somebody else's juice and putting it in there. Nothing wrong with that, like we've said before, but heck. I don't think it gets much better than this right here. Well, Jim, let's give this sucker a view. Let's check it out. Cheers. Cheers.

It's got a bit of a fruity and floral nose on it. You definitely pick up the spice, but it definitely noses like it's got a little more apes than three years.

Yeah, it's hard to always on a ride to get the true age of it because they do age a little quicker and stuff. I'm getting those spice ring apples I always talk about on this. You know, those got a real cinnamon spice to them. They're real deep, dark red. You know, there's that candy note in there from that syrup. So, I get a little pine note in this for some reason.

Do you get a pine note? I'm getting a little bit of like, yeah, like a pine forest, but I'm also getting like a like peaches, a little bit like peaches maybe, or, so not overly fresh, not overly ripe peaches, just sort of just, just ripe peaches. But the spice is there. I mean, you're getting that nice, right spice and.

Well, heck Jim, let's taste the sucker. Cheers. Cheers.

The spice is there. It's spicy but it's also fruity at the same time. It does have a little bit of a candy note to it. I can't imagine how candy this is going to get.

Oh, it feels like five or six years old. I can just imagine it's just going to be sticky sweet. You know, this one's still at 115. It's not as viscous as I thought it would be. And that's probably because the age I would imagine. But the candy notes are there that them spiced apples. I still get that spiced apple in there. Maybe some dark licorice.

Yeah, but the licorice is kind of light on it, I think. I think it's not overwhelming like it can be in sunrise. Yeah. And like you mentioned earlier, that pine forest note, it's just kind of in the background a little bit.

Yeah, just letting you know us there. I don't know why I thought of that. We don't have a lot of pine trees in this area of Kentucky. know, you'd have to get somewhere where they planted them. You know, you get out by Taylor'sville Lake, there are some pine trees out there, but it's more big hardwoods here. You know, big oak trees, big walnuts on our property. We got big old giant sycamore trees here, but not a whole lot of pine trees unless somebody's planted them. Bunch of dead ash trees too. Yeah. On our property, we don't have any ash trees, but you go right across the road and our neighbor, his whole hillside is covered in dead ash trees. It won't be long.

They'll be on the ground. Most of them are. It'll be history. Yeah, I think this is a wonderful rye whiskey. It definitely drinks to me like it's a little bit more grown up than three years. I feel like if somebody told me this was a five-year-old rye, I wouldn't argue with them. Yeah, it'd be hard.

You know, an expert even can trick them a little bit. I'm getting a little bit of raisin and anise in this, Jim. You know, that raisin. that you would find in like a cinnamon bread, you know? Okay, sure. Maybe just because that cinnamon taste I'm getting from this, that spice, just tingling on the tongue and the anise. Very nice sipping rye whiskey. You know, there's nothing wrong with it. I know I had something the other day, it was like, I'm not a rye drinker. And I was like, okay, well, tell me why. You know, are you not a rye bourbon drinker? Are you not a rye, well, I just don't like rye whiskies. That same person, though, ordered Crown Royal. Yeah. Which is what? Canadian rye whiskey. Yeah, it's rye whiskey. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think in their mind, they have this idea of what a rye is. But in a glass, it's not always what that stereotype is, right? A rye can be a wonderful, wonderful sweet candy whiskey, or it can be a spicy bomb of a pickle. I mean, it can be all over the place. No, when we went to the Hard Truth Distillery, we took a tour. They were nice enough to open up early and allow my wife and I to come in and they took us on a personal tour of the distillery. We got to taste a couple of different batches and see their operation there. Phenomenal place, but my wife, she is not a big bourbon drinker. She's definitely not a rye drinker, but when she had this one, she said, ooh, I like that. Now, it could have been partially the experience, right? She was there in the distillery having a tour and tasting from the barrel and all that. But I think this does have a very appealing palette to it, right? I mean, it's got a very nice candy sweet, kind of fruity, raisiny, but the harsh rye notes are in the background of it a little bit, so.

Well, let's talk about sweet mash for a second. Sure. We haven't talked about that in a while, I don't think. what a sweet mash is to our listeners. What is a sweet mash?

So, let's talk first what a sour mash is. Most whiskeys, most bourbons out there are sour mash made, which means every time they make a batch of bourbon, they hold back a little bit of that batch to add to the next batch so that they can carry over that, well, two things. They can carry over some of that that mother yeast, right? And also they can carry over a little bit of heat energy that they invested in that previous batch. and it jump starts. It's like sourdough bread, right? If you're making sourdough bread, you've got to have a little bit of that last batch you made, that mother batch that you feed into the next batch to make. Well, sweet mash starts fresh every single time. In fact, they go to such great lengths to make sure that they steam clean the system so there's nothing remaining from the prior batch.

And typically, a sour mash, that's what will give you that Kentucky hug. You get that hug. Right. That whiskey hug that everybody's, oh, it's burning. Well, it's not. It's the way the whiskey's made. Sure. And it is the alcohol too. Sure. On this, usually on typical sweet mash, you don't get that much of a hug. This has a nice hug. It's right up in my throw throw.

But the finish on this is it's fairly lengthy.

And it's a medium finish for such a young whiskey. It's got a nice finish on it. It does. It stays with you on your palate. Sticky sweetness. Almost like I just had some honey tea that's had too much honey in it. Yeah. But sometimes you put too much honey in it and it's kind of just sticky sweet on your tongue. Yeah. But this has that. That has that honey aspect. Some honey with it. I've got some Nashville or some hot honey. Um, and I would get a little bit spicy. Yeah. Oh yeah. We got like five jars of up in there. Yeah. If you've never had a peanut butter or peanut butter sandwich with hot honey on it, you're missing out on life with a cold glass of milk.

So this is, let's revisit this. This is the hard truth sweet mash rye whiskey. It's a straight rye. It's about three years old, a little more, a little less. I don't remember exactly. I think batch one came out between two and three years of age. This is batch five, so between batch one and batch five, they're just a little bit more time to age. But this would easily fool me. If somebody told me it was a five-year rye, I would probably say, yeah, I agree. It tastes like a five-year rye. It's 94% rye, 6% malted barley. And the distillery is a showplace. It's a place you need to go visit. Yeah, most definitely. What's the price on these, Jim? These are right at about $70.

$70 for 116.6 proof. Not a bad price. That's at the high end for that young whiskey. But still, let's talk about craft for a second. it cost to be a craft distillery. This isn't Jim Beam. This isn't Wild Turkey. This isn't Maker's Mark or Buffalo Trace, the giant in town. This isn't Four Roses. This is hard truth and it's a tiny distillery.

These guys are putting out 30 barrel batches. Not all that different from our friends over at Michter's who are doing small batches as well. And you know, it costs more money to do things that way. It costs money to produce with sweet mash. It costs money to produce in small batches. Nobody defines what a small batch is, but I have to say 30 barrels, that's a small batch. Yeah. What's their rick houses?

Are they temperature controlled?

No, they're not temperature controlled, but as far as I know, they're building more rick houses now, but the one they have on site is stacked to the roof, roof, roof, roof, roof. Stacked to the roof with barrels and it's quite a show place. The distillery itself is just amazing. So, I highly recommend taking a chance. going to visit Brown County, visit that distillery, get yourself a bottle of the hard truth, or at least go into town and have a pour.

Yeah, I'd recommend it. You're going to see it at Kroger. If you're here in Kentucky, make sure you grab a bottle. I'm not telling you to buy from Kroger. Kroger is not our sponsor. They could be. They could be. So, well, Jim, another great review. Listeners, Make sure you tune in on Wednesday. We got some big news to talk about. I think we actually have a whole bunch of news to talk about, but some big news. It'll be our Veterans Day. episode. We're both veterans. It means a lot to us. So, make sure, obviously, on Friday is Veterans Day. If you ever see a veteran, tell that veteran thank you for their service, for the sacrifice they made, because it is a sacrifice, right? Absolutely. To leave home and stuff. We both know that to be true. So, tune in Wednesday. It'll be a great show. I guarantee you some surprises in there. All right. Well, Mike, where can people find us on the Internet? Well, you can find us on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. We're all over the place. YouTube may places on Facebook at the bourbon roadies. It's private Facebook group. Three thousand strong. We got three rules to join. Are you 21? Do you love bourbon? Do you agree to play nice because we don't tolerate any rudeness in there?

Come in and join us and have a good time. We do two shows every single week. Every Monday we do a craft distillery episode just like today's where we'll take a single expression like this hard truth sweet mash rye. We'll give it a taste. We'll talk about it a little bit. We'll let you know whether or not you should add it to your bar. I think in this case, Mike and I are both a thumbs up.

Yeah, I'm a thumbs up on it. I like it.

So every Wednesday, we'll do a full-length episode. We'll have a guest on. We'll deep dive a subject. We'll have several expressions on. We'll give you an hour of our time. We'll get you to work and get you home, 30 minutes each way. Every week, two episodes. Mike, what do they have to do not to miss one?

well you need to scroll on up hit that check sign that plus sign that subscribe sign make sure that app tells you hey these two jokers have a show that's out today and you need to listen to it then scroll on down hit that five star review leave us some comments because you know what's gonna happen you don't the big bad booty daddy of bourbon is gonna come to your house knock on a door you'll have a bottle of this hard truth sweet mash rye in his hand you'll drink it all night long by the end of the night you'll leave us those comments you'll leave us those five star reviews i guarantee but seriously those reviews those comments they open up doors to distilleries they get great whiskey in our hand like i said about this hard truth sweet mash rye

We'd appreciate it. Well, Mike and I are very approachable. If you see us out in town, if you see us at a liquor store or at an event, if you run into us at a distillery taking a tour, make sure you come up to us and say, hey, we'd love to meet you. We'd love to hear your bourbon story. But if you've got an idea for a show, if you've got an idea for a guest or a bottle, make sure you let us know. Mike and I would love to hear from you. You can always go to our website. We have a Contact Us page there. Fill it out. We'll get back with you. and also send us emails. I'm jim at the bourbonroad.com. He's mike at the bourbonroad.com. But like we always say, probably the best way, just hit up our DMs on Instagram. I'm jshan63. I'm Big Bourbon Chief. We'll see you down the bourbon road.