On February 20th 8 individuals from CWS went down to New Riff distilling to do a single barrel bourbon pick. Organized by Steve Llewellyn and accompanied by Michael Baladi, Evan Tisher, Mark Tisher, Jeff Griebel, Andrew Simpson, Sam Stuart, and Nathan Thomas. New Riff provided a great experience and was very accommodating to the needs of the Crane Whiskey Society. Upon arrival we were greeted by Cory, a member of the New Riff Single Barrel team.

New Riff Distilling location

The single barrel selection did not occur at the distilling location, rather around the corner at the bottling and rick house location. After greetings on arrival Cory took us into the rick house for a tour. The New Riff rick house can store up to 18,000 barrels. The internal rick house structure is detached from the external concrete shell that covers it.

New Riff Rick house

New Riff Rick house group picture

The rick house was cool, despite the 60+ degree outside temperatures. As a group of engineers we made sure to point out several sketchy looking rails holding barrels in the rick house. Cory stated that in the peak of summer the top end of the rick house reached temperatures in the 125+ degree range.

After concluding in the rick house the group transitioned back to the bottling warehouse. We were shown the bottling line which was doing a practice run for a blend that was sitting in their proofing tanks. Once New Riff chooses a batch for bottling the barrels get weighed, dumped, and placed into proofing tanks. The proofing tanks can be used to blend the batch if necessary. They will slowly add water to the proofing tanks to achieve their target proof for a batch. The proofing tanks then feed the bottling line.

The single barrel staging area has stands where barrels selected for the single barrel program get placed. Each barrel has a 750 ml sample pulled that they will use to provide vials to tasting groups. The single barrel staff and other tour guides also sample the barrels and write up tasting notes for groups to reference after they have made their selections.

Our tasting session began with a pallet cleanser of a New Riff BiB bourbon. We were setup on two tables of four with 5 vials each to sample.

Tasting Session

Our Samples

 Ready to take notes

The approach of the group was to take a couple passes through and rank both nose and taste separately. As Mike expected from past barrel picks he found that one of his least favorite on the nose was his most favorite on the pallet. After everyone recorded some individual notes we consulted together and put some votes up on a white board. The group quickly was able to eliminate vial number 5. Vial number 4 also received fewer votes. Of course with 8 people that means on the votes we had an even split of 2 people per vial. While vials 4 and 5 were very lacking on the nose, vial 4 was an amazingly complex bourbon that Nate and Mike both pushed hard for. The majority of the tasting votes however went to vials 1 through 3 with some movement occurring as we continued to discuss and taste. Cory was quick to note that he had never before seen such an equal distribution of votes across so many barrels. Of course this resulting in some lively discussions and numerous varied ways of tabulating votes. After much debate we down selected to vials 2 and 3 and Cory offered to provide us with a second blind sample set of these 2. Mike confidently picked number 2 out of the blind sample set…… and was wrong. Of course our final vote tally of the last 2 vials was a dead even 4-4 split. In the end vial 3 was selected as the overall group consensus. After tasting was complete we were provided with the following staff tasting notes.

Staff tasting notes

Unfortunately the staff tasting notes were each done by different people which introduces a lot of variability into the notes. These were taken with a bit of skepticism. Our barrel, vial 3, ended up being the last one on the sheet. The * indicating a “light barrel.” For New Riff this means the final barrel weight ended up under 400 pounds. The barrel itself had some barrel candy on it so it may have had a small leak at one point. This is not detrimental to the final product so long as it hasn’t all spilled out. We ended up finding out we could customize to a case resolution how many bottles we could take and the 168 bottle final count to fulfill everyone's desires allocations may very well be close to the full amount of the “light barrel.”

Evan Tisher provided the following tasting notes from himself: “On the barrel we picked I think there was a nice balance between dessert and fruit. Maybe caramel and raspberry. Maybe a touch of a tea/rye note with some sweet oak.”

This was a challenging pick to achieve consensus on but all of these vials were solid bourbons from New Riff. Their willingness to accommodate fully on how many bottles we receive and the experience in general was really fantastic. We believe this is going to be an option we return to often in the future. Completing this bourbon pick will also make the group eligible for rye barrels going forward.

Group picture with our barrel (#3 )

Group picture with Cory from New Riff

New Riff will be bottling this barrel in the next 30 to 45 days, so we should see them some time in late March or early April.  Below are the final allocations and reimbursement amount owed to Steve or Nathan.  Kindly ask everyone to begin sending money now as Steve and Nathan have already paid for all bottles.  

If your last name begins with the letters A through F, please reimburse Steve via venmo @brewersteve (preferred) or paypal sativen@gmail.com. 

If your last name begins with the letters G through Z, please reimburse Nathan via venmo @btown_n8dagr8 (Preferred) or via paypal at Nathan.L.Thomas@gmail.com.