Tamworth’s New Whiskey Was Flavored with Goose, Plum and Spruce Tips
If you’re going to make flavored whiskey, you might as well get as weird as you can with it. That seems to be the mentality of Tamworth Distilling, anyway, which has made whiskey flavored with crab, venison, beaver oil, and even a Thanksgiving dinner. The latest creation from the New Hampshire distillery is called House of Tamworth Spruce & Goose, a whiskey infused with roast goose, spruce needles, and plum that is kind of like boozy Dickensian Christmas dinner.
Tamworth’s unusually flavored spirits are always interesting, even if they are not necessarily things you want to drink regularly. Past releases have included Crab Trapper, a whiskey flavored with invasive green crabs that kind of tastes like alcoholic bouillabaisse, and Eau De Musc Castoreum Whiskey, which was flavored with castoreum from the North American beaver’s castor gland. And let’s not forget about the more recent Saison de Frai, an apple brandy infused with smoked trout (which was actually quite good).
The details about how Spruce & Goose was produced are just as interesting as those previous efforts. According to distiller Matt Power, the first step was to slow roast a goose to dry it out while maximizing the Mailliard reaction, which gives the skin a golden color and “delicious roasty, toasty, poultry flavor.” “Once the bird is adequately roasted, we pick all of the meat and skin off the carcass, which is then ground up in a food processor,” he said. “The ground meat and skin are infused into the whiskey base, and then it is distilled on the rotary evaporator to create a goose distillate.”
Next, two other spirits are produced: a neutral grain spirit infused with spruce tips for three days before distillation, and a bourbon infused with Santa Ines plums. These components were blended with the goose distillate, and the entire batch was aged for a little more than two years. We got an early sample, and this is indeed another totally singular whiskey. There are ripe fruit and balsa wood notes on the nose, with some of the graininess you’d expect from a young whiskey. The fruit notes are the most prominent on the palate with the plum taking centerstage, but there is a bit of roasted meatiness lingering in the background along with vanilla, caramel, and honey, and just a hint of spruce.
This is not the first time that the Tamworth team has used spruce in its spirits, so they’ve committed to an initiative to help reforest the state of New Hampshire. The distillery purchased 112 acres of land and will plant one tree for every bottle of Spruce & Goose sold. “Our distillery was built and operates fully in accordance with the land, not against it,” said founder and owner Steven Grasse in a statement. “We only take what we can give back, and we craft our spirits with intentional methods that promote both the longevity and improved health of the environment that we revere so intently.”
House of Tamworth Spruce & Goose (SRP $65) is available to purchase now in small 200-ml bottles from the distillery, at New Hampshire liquor stores, and from a few websites like Seelbach’s.
