This Wheat Whiskey Finished in Cognac Casks Is Great

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

Bourbon is obviously the largest category in the wider world of American whiskey, but it’s not the only style. There’s rye whiskey, of course, but then you also have single malt, light whiskey, malt whiskey, blends, and wheat whiskey. That last category gets a little love from some of the big distilleries, but overall it’s still a bench player. Colorado’s Old Elk Distillery, however, is trying to change that, and its new Cask Finish Series release might help that come to pass.

Old Elk, which is located in Fort Collins, Colo., was founded more than a decade ago, but it’s been getting a bit more attention over the past few years. Greg Metze has been the master distiller since 2016, and whiskey aficionados may recognize him as the former master distiller for MGP who spent almost 40 years working at that Indiana distillery. While many brands and non-distiller producers source their whiskey from MGP, having Metze running the operation at Old Elk has surely given it an inside track into the massive amounts of stock aging there. Old Elk is in fact distilling small amounts of whiskey onsite in Colorado that may be released in some capacity down the road (most likely as distillery exclusives), but what’s in the bottles mostly comes from MGP (and occasionally other distilleries).

Old Elk’s core bourbon is defined by its unusual high-malt mashbill of 51 percent corn, 34 percent malted barley, and 15 percent rye—not something you see very often. There are also a wheated bourbon and rye whiskey in the lineup, but the range of special releases is where things start to get more interesting. One of the latest is a wheat whiskey, which as defined by the TTB must contain at least 51 percent wheat in the mashbill. Old Elk’s version is sort of a take on the way that MGP rye is made, with a mashbill of 95 percent red winter wheat and five percent malted barley. The use of the malted barley here is less about flavor and more about the chemical reaction of breaking the wheat break down into sugars that can be fermented. Still, this is very different from other wheat whiskeys you may have tried from Woodford Reserve or Heaven Hill, which have exactly or just over the required percentage of wheat.

Which brings us to the new Straight Wheat Whiskey Cognac Cask Finish, a project that was spearheaded by Old Elk master blender Melinda Maddox. Like the core wheat whiskey, it is aged for at least six years, but then the liquid is given a secondary maturation lasting between six months to a year in French Limousin oak barrels that were previously used to age Cognac. That might sound like a recipe for a really sweet whiskey, and indeed there is some of that character on the palate. But the whiskey is buttressed by notes of dried fruit, soft baking spice, fermented grape, apple crumble, black pepper, dark chocolate, and roasted coffee bean, and at 95 proof there’s a nice mouthfeel and warming finish to every sip.

Will this new release help to make wheat whiskey a more popular category? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s certainly a high-quality expression that has more complexity and character than you might expect, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the category. And given how much bourbon there is out there to choose from—not a bad thing, mind you—it’s fun to get to try a less common style of American whiskey that still delivers in terms of flavor and quality.

Score: 91