Tonight ... Trit! Trit? Yes, Trit... as in Triticale, a rye-wheat hybrid developed in Scotland in the late 1800s (and apparently Germany too). There are Bouryes that blend bourbon and rye... but what happens when you blend a rye grain with a bourbon grain and then distill that? Time to find out.
I went into this blind. On the nose I get a hodgepodge of whiskies - this one is all over the place. Malt at first, a touch of cereal grains, honey, fruit, sweet apple (possibly pear), orange peel, vanilla. Initial taste I get the orange, the vanilla, a simple sugar sweetness, some wood, some pepper spice. The mouthfeel is thin, I'm guessing this is young. Going back to the nose after some tastes and letting it sit - the nose has a distinctive malt funk that if I would have noticed it earlier, I would have known this was from the Pacific Northwest. Really - once you spot it, it pushes out everything else.
The finish has the pepper, the malt, the wood and orange. Overall, this is really quite nice. Adding water, the nose is similar, the taste is more peppery, and the finish brings in more wood notes. It's pretty good both ways, but probably better neat.
Drinking this blind, and not catching the funky malt notes, my guess on this would have been Irish. But we have already had all 4 Irish Whiskies for the 2024 24 Days of Whisk(e)y ... so I my guess was non-peated Scotch. And again ... I was wrong. Tonight we were drinking Branch Point Trit Straight Whiskey, 46% ABV. This one cost $55 - and I lumped it into the Rye category as it was Rye adjacent. For the 4 "Ryes", I probably liked this one the best. It's NAS, and if I was going to guess it's likely 2 or 3 years old. Mash bill of locally grown triticale, rye malt, and distillers malt, pot distilled. Everything done in Dayton, Oregon. I'll give it a 3.5/5.0 ... at least for today, it's not quite good enough to bump up to a 3.75... but it's quite good, cheers!
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