Breaking Bourbon New Riff

It's been nearly a year since we had a round of New Riff single barrels for Seelbach's, so we're glad to be able to offer this one up from our friends at Breaking Bourbon. We'll let them tell you more about the selection, and tasting notes.

 

In 2019 we interviewed New Riff Distilling Co-Founder Jay Erisman to learn more about the distillery and share with our readers. Since then, we’ve selected five barrels, with this latest barrel being our 5th. New Riff Distilling’s onsite barrel selection process is extremely well thought out, and we couldn’t recommend it more highly if you have an opportunity to select a barrel.

One of the most exciting aspects of selecting New Riff barrels is the extreme variation in flavor profiles they achieve across barrels in the sample set. It’s proof that barrels derived from the same mashbill can taste dramatically different due to other factors, and highlights the purpose of selecting single barrels in the first place - to find something unique that doesn’t taste quite like anything else. In this particular case, we tasted barrels showcasing this extreme variation to the max.

We easily drew the sample set down to two, but then found ourselves in a more complex debate than we typically would. We had two barrels we all really liked, and the discussion was not so much “who likes what” but more “which would the club prefer” style of discussion. On the one hand, we had a barrel that was so incredibly dark in color, rich with deep oak and caramel, but also (arguably) overly punchy. The color was insane. On the other hand, we had a barrel that was complex, balanced between sweet, savory, and spice, had a near perfect body, and was highly drinkable.

Ultimately, we found the balance so on point with the latter, we decided it outweighed the uniqueness of the punchy, dark barrel. The main takeaway: selecting New Riff barrels is always a lot of fun.