Our McCarthy’s barrel pick will go on sale on October 4th, 2024, at 5:30pm Pacific time / 8:30pm Eastern! This release will be exclusive access for The Whiskey Lodge Discord for one week after it goes up for sale; however, note that anyone can join the Discord at any time!

First, some details and updates. Then scroll down to learn a bit of the story of how this barrel pick came to be.

See this document for all the latest updates on when the pick will go on sale, as well as some additional technical details: Whiskey Lodge x SMF McCarthy’s Rum Cask Barrel Pick – Google Docs (I’ll try to keep this blog post updated as well.)

Join us for a livestreamed release party October 4th, 2024, at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern.

Final specs: McCarthy’s Oregon Single Malt Whiskey, Single Barrel #701, Cask Strength, aged 6.71 years in an ex-Casa Magdalena Rum Cask. Final yield is 156 bottles. Final bottling strength is 56.83% ABV / 113.66 proof.

• Date barreled: December 6th, 2017
• Date removed from barrel: August 21st, 2024
• Date filled into bottles: August 28th, 2024
• The exact age is 6 years, 8 months, 15 days (6.71 years)

This McCarthy’s single barrel pick was a collaboration between The Whiskey Lodge Discord community and the Single Malt Frontier podcast. Doug (@DemiTastes) was the primary contact on tasting and logistics, including figuring out a retailer, the sticker design, deciding the barrel was mature to our tastes and ready to be pulled for bottling, and more. Lots of opinions and help throughout the process were given by Phill of the Ranger’s Respite (also co-host of Single Malt Frontier, and an admin of The Whiskey Lodge), SailorGraf aka BulletMagnet (a moderator of The Whiskey Lodge), the inimitable @Joe (the founder/owner of The Whiskey Lodge), and other members of The Whiskey Lodge mod team and community.

As a nod to the integral part that the community played in the selection of this single barrel, The Whiskey Lodge will get one week of exclusive access to purchase this bottle when it goes on sale. The link and password for that exclusive access will be made available strictly within The Whiskey Lodge Discord. However, anyone can join at any time to get access to the pick by clicking this Whiskey Lodge Discord Invite Link.

Now, on to how this whole thing came together.

I initially met Joseph O’Sullivan in early 2021 while he was Head Distiller of Clear Creek Distillery, maker of McCarthy’s Oregon Single Malt. (Note that this was even before he was named Master Distiller of all brands for Clear Creek & Hood River Distillers.) We had both very recently joined The Whiskey Lodge Discord community, and he struck me as a super awesome person, and also a maker of whiskey who genuinely enjoyed his own product. I was admittedly skeptical at first of how much of that enthusiasm was his taking the opportunity to market his own products, but I nevertheless went and found a bottle of McCarthy’s — and was blown away by how awesome it was. To this day, that McCarthy’s Single Barrel #70 is one of my favorite whiskeys of all time.

After I’d made a visit or two to the distillery and became friends with Joe — and meanwhile fallen in love with the category of American Single Malt Whiskey through exposure to a few other brands — I expressed to Joe some vague plans that I had done so much research that I would like to write a book about American Single Malt, that I’d want to start interviewing producers as primary research for that book, and that I might as well release those interviews as a podcast, yada yada — and oh by the way it would be pretty cool to do a barrel pick in conjunction with all of that and in collaboration with The Whiskey Lodge community that made our friendship possible.

(I apparently don’t do anything half-way.)

Joe thought that a Whiskey Lodge barrel pick was a great idea and since he loved The Whiskey Lodge he was more than happy to start the process of finding us interesting samples to try. In the first round of samples he sent me was this really cool rum cask McCarthy’s, or RumCarthy’s (or RumMcCarthy’s) as he affectionately called it, at just about 3.5 years old. It was a cool spec, tasty, one of my earliest tastes of the Double Mountain Brewery-based McCarthy’s distillate. But the coolest thing about it was “rum cask.” A rum cask finish, let alone full maturation, was a cask specification for whiskey that was basically unheard of for me up to that point. (Keep in mind I’d only been reviewing whiskey since October 2020.)

The only problem at that time was that it was a bit too soft on the wood profile — not balanced yet. “Not quite ready,” we agreed, and decided we should keep an eye on it. I tasted this barrel several times over the next 2 years. I also tasted a few other interesting things that came up, but none captured my interest quite the same way for what would be my first barrel pick, the barrel pick that would establish my quality as a cask-picker, that barrel #701 did. In late 2023, Joseph O’Sullivan moved on from Clear Creek to Minden Mill Distilling, and Caitlin Bartlemay (now Master Distiller of Clear Creek and HRD) took over the project of setting me up with this barrel pick.

So far, I’ve only mentioned myself as the agent in charge of tasting and choosing a barrel. That’s unfortunately kind of true. With a nationally distributed barrel pick team like we had, and given the limited availability of small tastes of interesting barrels, the beginning of the process of narrowing down the right barrel was a relatively solo endeavor for the barrel picker, at least in my experience, unless there’s more than one person in-person at the distillery to help taste things. However, the Whiskey Lodge mod team was as involved and informed the whole way as possible given those restrictions. Ultimately, they were comfortable with trusting my judgment.

It was also important to us that there would be a market for the barrel pick, so we had to give something of a hint to the community that this was coming. Mostly this was of the form of, “We’re working on a McCarthy’s single barrel pick with a cool cask, would you be interested in buying a bottle or several?” and giving updates along those lines as we moved through the process.

Getting feedback on the barrel pick from the community was a tricky thing because the cask specification — that is, rum cask, let alone full-maturation rum cask — was Super Secret until Fall 2023, when the first of the two RumMcCarthy’s barrels had hit the market. The community was ultimately enthusiastic about us picking a cool McCarthy’s single barrel, and that’s about all we could hope for, and about all the feedback we could get.

What we did definitively get from the community throughout this process was general approval that a Whiskey Lodge barrel pick was something they wanted to do, that a McCarthy’s Oregon Single Malt Single Barrel sounded great, and that an “interesting cask” was desirable. Oh, and it had to be tasty, but that was a given for McCarthy’s. Besides that, and given the highly distributed nature of the community, it was desirable that we find a retailer who could deliver bottles to as many places as possible. All of those details were pretty much settled with the community about 2 years ago. The rest was tasting, trying, and navigating the process of finding a retailer and doing the paperwork on the barrel pick process.

In terms of hints about what was coming, there was also a COLA label submission we saw several months before the release of the sister cask RumMcCarthy’s #702 at 5.6 years old. The COLA revealed the existence of McCarthy’s fully matured in a rum cask. The release of barrel #702 revealed that there was more than one cask!

Even after that point, the fact that we were even looking at doing a barrel pick of the RumMcCarthy’s — let alone its age, or the fact that it was the only remaining cask of RumMcCarthy’s — was still a secret until very late in the game. In fact, we weren’t able to share any details about cask or age with the community until after the whiskey was in bottles, when we were finally able to announce the details.

The secrecy here was, I imagine, largely a concern by HRD that, until we had some kind of signed contract to buy the barrel or some other agreement, it was a marketing risk to publicly reveal the existence of the cask, and potentially risk their ability to control the marketing of something that hadn’t been sold. We want everyone to know that we fully understand the sensitivity around a cool barrel like this, and the risk of giving up marketing control before the ink was dry.

We honestly wish we could have given more details sooner in the process but ultimately the meandering route by which we tried to choose a retailer made it exceedingly difficult to release details about our cask. All the love to our community for their understanding as we had to keep details to a minimum. And more importantly, we deeply appreciate the Clear Creek team for working to make process as easy as possible and patiently sticking with us as we figured the whole thing out.

Barrel #701 went into bottles on August 28th. The official announcement of our pick was our pre-recorded announcement video, featuring an interview and tasting with Master Distiller Caitlin Bartlemay, as Episode 27 of the Single Malt Frontier podcast (below), which we published on September 11th, 2024, the first possible day we could reveal the details.

From the beginning of this journey, 3 years ago, at every step of the way, this barrel was the most interesting barrel to us — and, we felt, it would be most interesting to the community. It was one of the first we had tasted and it held our attention no matter what other options came along that were also interesting and tasty that we could potentially release sooner. Our reaction was along the lines of, “This is nice, but no, barrel #701, the RumMcCarthy’s — that’s still the one.”

The Whiskey Lodge mod team was involved anytime there was something new to report. A new barrel I’d tasted, my tasting notes and general thoughts about that taste, reaching a new step in the process, discovering a new hurdle to overcome.

Eventually the day came that we decided “yes, this is definitely the barrel for us, and it’s mature enough now” that it’s ready to start traveling down the road to getting into bottles. At that point, we finally received a whole pint flask to distribute among the pick team to taste, so that they could finally see what the few of us who had been able to taste it were so hyped up about. They were able to contribute their tasting notes and/or general stamp of approval. Luckily we had no dissenting opinions.

The biggest hurdle for us was actually finding a retailer that met the specifications. Someone that would carry, retail, and ship the bottles for us, including paying for the barrel if necessary, or letting us pay for the barrel and getting reimbursed from sales later. We looked at a number of options and it wasn’t so much that we couldn’t find a good fit as that many of them simply didn’t respond.

Ultimately, it was difficult to find a retailer who would simply take the (considerable) chance on carrying the first barrel pick by a relatively small online community, so we decided that it made the most sense for us to partner directly with Clear Creek and HRD themselves to bottle and retail this barrel pick, with our sticker on it. We were able to negotiate the exclusive access period as part of the deal, and we’re ultimately really happy with where we landed. We just wish we could have gotten it done a bit faster.

The good news is that, now that we’ve gone through this process for the first time, we’ve learned a lot about what it would take to move things more quickly through the process. Hopefully we’ll do another American Single Malt barrel pick at some point in the future, maybe sometime next year. We have an idea or two about which brands would be most likely candidates to get the approval of the community, and we’re excited to start that process when it’s time.

For now, we’re going to let this single barrel 6.5-year RumMcCarthy’s go out into the world — and we’re going to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our years of effort that we put into this thing. It’s been a long road, but it’s been well worth the wait. We can’t wait to see what everyone thinks.

Cheers,
Doug