Kentucky’s Resurrected Peerless Distilling Brings Forth Three-Year-Old Rye

Three years after its resurrection, Louisville’s Kentucky Peerless Distilling will debut a three-year-old straight rye whiskey in early 2019. The release follows their initial release last year, a Kentucky straight rye that was named the fifteenth best whiskey in the world by Whisky Advocate.

The 3-year-old Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey is the same recipe aged an extra year. “Peerless Rye Whiskey continues to become more complex as we add age,” said Peerless’s Cordell Lawrence in a prepared statement. “We want to reinforce that although we’ve only been barreling since 2015, we have carefully crafted an independent path that is here to stay. We don’t source and we don’t cut corners.”

These whiskeys are somewhat unusual in using a sweet mash process, where new yeast is used in each batch—most American whiskeys are made using a sour mash, which essentially means the distiller adds some of the previous batch of mash, already fermented, into the current batch, much like making sourdough bread. The distillery says the sweet mash process is closer to what would have originally been done at the historic Peerless site, which operated from 1889 to 1917 before closing down due to Prohibition.

After almost a hundred years of inactivity, Corky Taylor, the grandson of that historic distillery’s owner at the time it closed down, brought it back from the dead, complete with the original Distilled Spirits Plant Number, relocating from Henderson, Kentucky, to Louisville.

The whiskeys then go into the barrel at a relatively low entry proof of 107, again said to be a nod to tradition, and are un-chill-filtered and bottled at barrel proof.

The three-year-old expression will be available nationwide at an eye-popping suggested retail price of $125.00; you can also taste and buy at Peerless’s downtown Louisville distillery.