66. Ragged Branch Distillery - Wheated Virginia Straight Bourbon

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.

Welcome back for another installment of Craft Distillery Monday here on the Bourbon Road. This week Mike and I taste a weeded bourbon from a distillery in Virginia that's checking all the boxes. We would like to thank our friends at Premium Bar Products for sponsoring this episode. If you're ready to step up your game at your home bar, check out premiumbarproducts.com to choose from their wide selection of glassware, all of which can be custom engraved with your personal message or logo. And there's no minimum order. So after the episode, head over to premiumbarproducts.com and check out everything they have to offer. Now let's get on with the show. Hello, everybody. I'm Jim Shannon. I'm Mike Hyatt. This is the Bourbon Road. And Mike, we are back at Studio One once again. We're back here, man. It's nice and cool down here, though. It is. It is. You know, I really miss going out on the road and visiting people.

Well, I've been back out, I guess, a little bit. You did. I've been I've been trying and. We're fixing to get back on the road again. I'll be in Texas here next couple weeks for our main episodes and kind of got out a little bit today.

Well, you know, it's kind of a new norm. We kind of had to rearrange things and figure out how to keep the podcast going while we were sequestered. And I think we made the best of things.

Yeah, I think everybody has, right? We learned that with two old guys, we learned how to do a social media streaming. That was something new for us.

Here's one thing I have to say about it. There's no substitute for being face to face in person with somebody.

I definitely agree with you on that. I can make a room light up if I can get. Sitting next to you if I'm face to face with you.

Yeah, and I can make you believe in what we're doing It seems like you just you just don't have that intimacy, you know you there's kind of a delay there and you over talk each other a little bit and You know, you're not sure when when the right time is to speak up and it makes it hard But when you're in the same room with somebody you can see that expression on your face you can you feel that conversation flow and it just works a lot better and I'm really looking forward to the day when we can just put away our stream yard and just go back to what we were doing, which is driving around and talking to people on the road.

I think that was good, but it also opened us up to doing an episode like today, right? Because there's some distilleries that we would just not be able to drive to. It's almost impossible unless we want to just drive it all 50 states. I don't know if we have a budget for that, do we? Well, hopefully, buy more Glen Carons. We're going to have to sell a whole lot of Glen Carons to make that happen.

No, but we had Sam on today and that was a lot of fun. Sam from the Bourbon House out of the UK. Yeah, we would never probably ever get to do, well, maybe someday, but normally under normal circumstances, we would not get to do an episode like that with a fellow like Sam. And that was a blast. We got to drink some bullet whiskey with a fella out of the UK and he was a real fan.

And he'll be on our weekly episode after this episode. So make sure you tune into that episode and listen to Sam. He's got a great page. He's the Bourbon House on Instagram. He's got a lot of followers and stuff. And I love that. I love being able to talk about that. Opened us up to a new thing and taught us both something new. I definitely learned so much about stream yard and video conferencing. I'd never known that before, did that. So I got to say thank you for pushing me to my limits on this stuff.

That's pretty cool. Pretty cool, wasn't it? Yeah. So the bourbon house, and we're not going to let any cats out of the bag, but there's a reason he's called the bourbon house. And you are going to be absolutely blown away when you find out why he's called the bourbon house. Most definitely.

So today, we're gonna keep on our craft distillery, reviewing their whiskies, trying new whiskies, whiskies that some states can get. And this whiskey can be found in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and the owner's home state of Louisiana too. And he's pushing it out there a little bit. I think it'll push over into West Virginia and hopefully to Kentucky. They're making all their own grain over there. It's pretty much from the farm. to the steel site, which we love to see that. Some people say grain to glass. Grain to glass. Ground to glass. Ground to glass. Ground to glass. That would be what he's doing. He's farming the land, and he even takes it a step further. Their spit grain goes to their cattle, and you can actually buy their beef at their distillery. Oh, really? So that's a pretty neat thing.

Yeah.

So you get a little bit of bourbon in your beef.

We get some bourbon brisket, some bourbon brisket.

So this is Ragged Branch out of Charlottesville, Virginia. Randy, if you're listening to this, you need to go pay this place a visit. It's just down the road from him. How far is Crooked Whisker from Ragged Branch? I want to say it's about a two hour drive. I could be wrong about that, but he's got nothing else to do up there in the mountain. You might as well drag out to a distillery, right? Probably ride one of those horses over there. Definitely. This is actually right up my allogene. This is a weeded bourbon that's been double-oaked.

Okay. So they're aging it for some amount of time in a new oak barrel? So three years was their standard.

Now they went to 40 years. in a 53 gallon barrel, and then they put it back into a brand new barrel. A brand new barrel.

So is it like a heavy charred barrel?

Is it a toasted barrel? It doesn't. He didn't say all that to me. I talked to him on the phone. He was a really nice guy. I think it's just a charred barrel, and I'll have to look on our site here real fast.

Well, I'm nosing this thing already. What's the proof on it? Nanny proof. Nanny proof. So I'm getting a smoky corn. It's very sweet caramel. Smoky corn sweet caramel. What is that? So it's Cracker Jacks. Smoky Cracker Jacks. You get any toasted nuts in there?

It is a little nutty. It is, yeah. I think this is pretty heavy on the oak, obviously, because it's double oak, but maybe that maltiness in there.

Yeah, I'm not sure how much of that they have in there, but I can tell you this much. It's picking up that secondary sweetness from that other barrel, because it's very sweet. It reminds me a little bit on the nose of the double-oaked Woodford. Now, this has got a little bit more corn. to it. It's a little bit more, a little fresher, so it's probably a little bit younger than the Woodford. I could see that, but not by much. A little bit.

Let's see how it tastes. All right. Sweet. It is very sweet. So it's pulling all the sweetness out of both those barrels.

Kind of buttery on the tongue a little bit. A little bit, but you know that smokiness carries through to the finish. I'm getting a little bit of smokiness on the finish as well. That extra barrel probably just put it right where it's at. That's a pretty good bourbon right there. That's good. I'll tell you what. Is it that velvety on the tongue, I guess? A little bit. I mean, it's not thick, but it's creamy, a little creamy.

A second sip there, I did get that smoke. And a lot of oak from that second barrel, I believe. It's got a little bite to it on the back end. Yeah, I could get that. Just a little bit of pepper. But that's not, that's not rye bite, is it? That's, that's barrel bite. Yeah, I would think that is that barrel bite you're always talking about. And it's not right on that tip of your tongue. You know, you get that bite. It's a little bit further down that bite is, and you start getting that Kentucky hug from this.

And for a 90, this is, doesn't drink like a 90 proof. Take a peek at that bottle, Mike. Independently handcrafted ragged branch, weeded bourbon, Virginia straight bourbon whiskey, double oat, twice barrel, barrel number 1039, bottle 236. So I'm wondering, so when they call out barrel 1039, that's the number of the second barrel, I would imagine. So I'm wondering if this is blended. out of the first barrel into a big batch and then poured into second barrels and then they're giving us the barrel number of the second barrel. Second barrel. Yeah, I think it's probably true. Or he's small enough to where he's just doing barrel to barrel. I mean, it's fair enough. Ragged branches nestled in the foothills of the Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville, Virginia. As a farm to bottle distillery, we grow, harvest, and mill wheat and corn to craft our homegrown bourbon recipe. All right, so farm distillery, doing it all themselves, all the way from ground to glass. I'm impressed. So what's kind of the history of this place?

I think Alex Tumey is the owner. He's the distiller now. They brought in Dave Pickrell, legendary guy, right, from Maker's. Never heard of him. Never heard of that guy. He has his hands or had his hands in a lot of distilleries. He passed away a couple of years ago and he was, seems like he was pretty famous for the wheat, right? Kind of spreading that lineage of maker's mark throughout the United States and maybe throughout the world. People were loving, starting to love this wheated bourbon and I think you can taste his lineage inside this bourbon right here.

Yeah, I think, you know, this is a very good bourbon. I think I would like to see it. I would, no, not that it needs to change. I think the distiller did a great job putting this together, but I would be interested to try a higher proof version of this.

Well, he does have a barrel program out there and he's letting people do single barrels out there that are full proof or batch proof or barrel proof. Whatever you want to call it. Right. I'd believe that that would be nice to taste that at a higher proof. Maybe 110 would be up a great alley and stuff. He also has a bottled Bond out there now, which speaks to a distillery when they can release something like that.

Now, is there an age on this one here? You mentioned something about four years. He said four years in the first barrel and then a year in the second barrel.

I think it's a good bourbon solid. I actually picked this up in December. I went seeing my son in Louisiana and a store had it down there and they got some special Louisiana bottles for down there that had that purple and gold.

So you mentioned some states up in the East Coast where this was located and then all of a sudden there's Louisiana.

I think Alex told me he's from Louisiana. That's his home state. And that's why he, he'll distribute down there. And he's got a whole bunch of single barrels down there too. And I couldn't find a single barrel while I was down there, but I saw that, you know, if I see a weeded bourbon on the shelf, what do you think is going to happen? You can grab it.

I'll probably, especially when it's as dark as this one. This is dark whiskey. It is pretty dark. And you know, it's typical of a double bear whiskey that picks up that color from the second barrel. Now as this has opened up a little bit, I'm smelling a little bit more malt in it.

This is a weeded bourbon. So we don't know the mash bill on this exactly. He didn't say the mash bill exactly on it.

So we're assuming that this is a high corn mash bill. Obviously it's bourbon and then it's got wheat as a flavoring grain and then some amount of malted barley to kick off the fermentation process.

I want to say his wheat is around 20%.

All right, well. Again, if this is something we learn a little bit more about later, we'll throw it up on the blog and people can learn about it. But Ragged Branch, not available in Kentucky. But not yet. Not yet. But you said it's down to Virginia? It's made in Virginia.

Made in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia, and Louisiana. And Louisiana. OK. So the middle Atlantic. It's spreading. I think it might spread like wildfire. It's pretty good. Well, Jim, I'd say this is another fine review of a whiskey. If you're out there, your craft distillery, you don't mean a Jim to sit down and sip on your whiskey a little bit, talk about it, discuss it, send us an email, give us a phone call. We'll definitely drink your whiskey.

Listeners are interested in not just the big bottles, not just the well-known unicorns, but they're also interested in the up and comers. Who's stepping out of the box?

Yeah, some people I think need to step out of the box. We've talked about that before. Not everybody needs to be a Kentucky-style bourbon, right? The Kentuckians, when they first started, somebody had to step out of the box and put corn and whiskey, and that was the Kentuckians that made the bourbon. I did find the mash bill in this gym. It's 66% corn, 17% wheat, and 17% barley.

Oh, it's a high barley content. You're right. You nailed it. You nailed it on the pallet there, buddy, when you called out that barley. So I'm picking it up. I can get it a little bit. It didn't shout at me, but when you mentioned it, I... Well, Jim, another fine review. I say let's, we'll see you on down to bourbon. Cheers, my friend.

Cheers.

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