WhistlePig’s new rye whiskey honors beloved pig Mauve
If you want to get a sense of how WhistlePig Distillery has upended the whiskey industry, look no further than its latest release, The Boss Hog V: The Spirit of Mauve, a rye whiskey that sells for about $500 for a 750-milliliter bottle.
The Boss Hog has always been WhistlePig Distillery’s special one-off, whenever-it-feels-like-it single-barrel, barrel-proof release. To date, WhistlePig has felt like it five times since its first Boss Hog release in 2013.
The Boss Hog V: The Spirit of Mauve is a tribute to Mauve, a Kunekune pig that lived on the distillery’s Vermont farm. Mauve was beloved, one of the farm’s two “founding celebrity pigs” (the other, named Mortimer, died in 2014 and was honored with the Boss Hog release called The Spirit of Mortimer). And while every Boss Hog release has been special in that each has pushed the boundaries of rye whiskey, this one is unique because it is the last one that Dave Pickerell, WhistlePig’s legendary master distiller who unexpectedly died on Nov. 1, oversaw.
Pickerell was a character, a former college football player who loved to talk whiskey and who wasn’t afraid to be outlandish; he’d dress in a white suit and hat a la Sorrell Booke’s Boss Hogg character in television’s “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
To honor Mauve, Pickerell crafted an elegant, nuanced whiskey that plays upon her guilty pleasure: apples. “If you threw an apple at her, she’d go crazy,” Pickerell told me a couple of weeks before he died. “When she passed away, we wanted to figure out a way to create something glorious in her honor.”
The result is a 13-yearold rye that aged in casks that had previously held calvados, the French apple brandy, for a short span. (Pickerell would only say it was somewhere between two and 10 weeks.) The result is a remarkable whiskey with a nose that melds cider, tobacco and cardamom. And a surprisingly sweet whiskey with notes of maple syrup and pears and a hint of spice.
That complex flavor stems from the Pickerell approach. “I refer to it as short-term finishing,” he said. “I don’t like to change the underlying character of the rye, just add fun notes to it.”
That mindset is evident in a range of WhistlePig’s ryes, including those that are certainly expensive, but not mind-bogglingly so.
Take its Old World Cask Finish 12-year-old Rye Whiskey that marries whiskeys aged in new American oak, then finished in port (7 percent), French sauternes (30 percent) and madeira casks (63 percent). The result is a rye that reveals different elements as you sip and savor it. With one sip, you might get a hint of raisins, another dark cherries and another Italian prune plums.
Just about every WhistlePig is special — from its flagship 10-year rye, which is sourced from an AlbertaCanada, distillery, then finished by WhistlePig in bourbon barrels to The Boss Hog. And that’s a testament to Pickerell, who had the vision to “unlock the potential of rye whiskey,” he said. “We want to protect what makes rye whiskey great, toss out the rest and then innovate to make it better.”
Mission accomplished.
American pie is a sweet tradition — apple, pumpkin, chocolate. But in Britain, pie is baked up savory — pork, duck, chicken, pigeon, sausage.
And how. Meat pie is packed right to the ridges — no slick sauce or crisp carrot distraction. Heated, plunked on a pool of mashed potatoes and doused with mushy peas — that’s a meal that means it.
Even the exterior is
2 4 larded with lard. Hotwater crust upends everything the American pastry chef practices and preaches: cold butter, cold counter, light touch. In northern Britain, the baker starts by boiling water and lard, then grabs a wooden spoon. The result is a pie brawny enough to heft its load of pork products and tasty enough to lift the winter gloom.