New Riff First Decade Bourbon Is a Solid Whiskey

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.

Ten-year-old bourbon is not that big of a deal, because there’s plenty of it. Sometimes it’s priced reasonably (Russell’s Reserve), sometimes not so much (Michter’s 10, even though it’s arguably worth the splurge). But a 10-year-old bourbon is a pretty big deal when it’s the first time a distillery has been able to release whiskey that old due to the fact that it finally has whiskey that old. That is the case with New Riff, an independent Kentucky distillery that just released a pair of 10-year-old whiskeys for the very first time—and it was worth the wait.

New Riff has been around since 2014, so it makes sense that now would be the time when the distillery is able to release a 10-year-old whiskey. From the start, the focus has been on making bottled-in-bond whiskey—as a reminder, that means the liquid is at least four years old, matured in federally bonded warehouses, bottled at exactly 100 proof, and the product of one distillery and one distillation season. Along the way, there have been some other expressions as well, including single barrel, barrel-proof whiskeys, a series of excellent cask-strength American single malts, and rye whiskeys made with different grain varietals.

First Decade Bourbon, which we are focusing on here, was made from what the distillery calls its “standard mashbill” of 65 percent corn, 30 percent rye, and 5 percent malted barley (the rye, on the other hand, is made from a 95 percent rye-5 percent malted barley mashbill, much like what you’d find from MGP in Indiana). It was bottled without chill filtration at 120.5 proof, so obviously this doesn’t qualify as a bottled-in-bond whiskey. I actually wish it was bottled at a bit lower proof, because there’s a rawness and intensity to the palate, even given my experience with high-proof whiskey, that makes me wonder how this would be at about 110 proof. Still, this is a very good bourbon, and it wears its age well. A pronounced fruitiness leads on the palate, something that I generally find with New Riff‘s bourbon, perhaps due to the yeast the distillery uses for fermenting the mash. That note mingles with flavors of dark chocolate, caramel, roasted espresso, baking spice, black pepper, and molasses, and the whiskey’s inherent sweetness is nicely tempered by the spice from the high percentage of rye in the recipe.

There’s a catch, though it’s not insurmountable: To get a bottle of this $90 whiskey you have to join the New Riff Whiskey Club, which you can do here. As mentioned in the intro, there are many other bottles of 10-year-old bourbon to try, ranging from must-buy bargains to exorbitant splurges. New Riff First Decade falls somewhere in between, but it’s certainly worth trying whether you would like to explore the maturation trajectory of the distillery’s whiskey, or are just looking for a solid bourbon that wasn’t made by a legacy name.

Score: 87