Episode 206 - Redwood Empire with Lauren Patz

In this barrel-aged deep dive into Bourbon and American whiskey with distiller Lauren Patz, some of the topics we discuss include:

• How Lauren’s roots in Napa Valley winemaking led her to fall in love with the craft of distillation and barrel maturation.
• Why California in general (and Northern California, in particular) is a burgeoning American whiskey ecosystem bursting with local grain, available cooperage, and more native wine finishing opportunities than anywhere else in the country.
• Then we walk through Lauren’s method for making Redwood Empire Whiskey step-by-step, examining her approach to important procedural touchpoints like malting, fermentation, sourcing, maturation, and blending.
• We also sample a delicious new product offering called “Grizzly Beast,” which is a bonded bourbon whiskey made using some of the first barrels of whiskey laid down by Redwood Empire in their early days of operation.
• We also take some time to work through Lauren’s approach to evaluating and judging bourbon and American whiskey as an anchor judge for the American Distilling Institute’s annual judging of craft spirits.

Along the way, we chat about the wheat-and-rye hybrid grain you’ve never heard of, the virtues of “negative capability,” what to drink with Dune author Frank Herbert, and much, much more.

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