Rye whiskey was the “distillate of choice” on the Eastern Seaboard in colonial and post-colonial days, said F. Paul Pacult in Wine Enthusiast. George Washington’s private distillery on his Mount Vernon estate contained five copper pot stills, which produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey in the three years before he died. His recipe called for grain ratios of 60 percent rye, 35 percent corn, and 5 percent barley.
After the Civil War, corn-based bourbon became the fashionable set’s whiskey of choice, and rye began a long slide into obscurity. In recent years, however, new labels have begun to debut, and bartenders are adopting original recipes that call for rye in such cocktails as the Manhattan and the Old Fashioned. These three recommended ryes, based on our 100-point scale, come from a recent sampling of 20 American and Canadian ryes:
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Garsington Opera opens its summer festival with two 'very different productions'The Week Recommends A 'fabulous' new staging of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and Donizetti's fake-love-potion comedy L'elisir d'amore
-
The Rehearsal series two: Nathan Fielder's docu-comedy is 'laugh-out-loud funny'The Week Recommends Television's 'great illusionist' has turned his attention to commercial airline safety
-
The Ballad of Wallis Island: bittersweet British comedy is a 'delight'The Week Recommends A reclusive millionaire lures his favourite folk duo to an island for an 'awkward reunion'
