Ol’New Riff Rye

What if New Riff existed 120 years ago? What would our whiskey taste like? The Ol’ New Riff project seeks out old time whiskey flavors through the use of pre-Prohibition production methods; heirloom grains; and old fashioned cooperage. We did everything we could to work in the mindset of a Northern Kentucky distiller circa 1900. Every step of the process was examined for historical accuracy to the production methods of the day, including:

• Mashbills typical of the day, with additional barley malt, and a portion of corn used in the rye whiskey.
• We used two-row malted barley as opposed to the modern “distiller’s malt” we use today.
• No additional diastatic enzymes were added to the mash to help convert the starches to fermentable sugars
• A barreling proof of 103, typical of the day as the modern legal limit of 125 proof was not adopted until the 1960s.
• For about half the barrels, our Aquifer water was used to cut the whiskey in the
  barrel, as opposed to the reverse osmosis water we typically employ.
• The barrels were crafted the way they might have been made in the 19 th century. Specifically, the staves were not kiln dried before the barrel was made, they were only and entirely air dried.

Ol’ New Riff Rye is unlike anything we’ve made: a traditional, typical Kentucky-style rye using a considerable percentage of corn.