I love WhistlePig ryes, but it’s an expensive habit.
Its flagship product, aged 10 years, retails for about $100. But the company famously makes super-premium products, with many bottles running into the mid-hundreds of dollars and northward (15-year estate aged, $300; Boss Hog V, $1,000 from independent sellers online).
WhistlePig rye and The Lodge at Spruce Peak in Stowe, Vermont sponsored my visit.
When I’m feeling flush and contemplative I’ll order a 12-year Old World neat at a bar, savoring the lovely complexity the company’s artisans coax from the spicy, notoriously difficult-to-work-with grain, nodding in quiet admiration and muttering “Damn, 25 bucks a shot?”
Many WhistlePig products are precise, rich, smooth, and elevated, carrying flavor details you simply don’t find in other ryes. (As I point out below, this isn’t true of all products.)
I recently visited with company reps and customers at the Lodge at Spruce Peak in Stowe, Vermont, about two hours from WhistlePig’s headquarters. There’s a WhistlePig Pavilion and a Tasting Shack for high-end pours at the tony four-season resort.
Happily, I got to drink a whole bunch of it during my visit, including a breakfast (!) whiskey and waffles tasting, some quality time in the shack, and a barrel-tasting, where I served as an additional palate as a hospitality executive chose a barrel to be used by his Massachusetts restaurant group. I also got to interview WhistlePig’s head blender.
Here’s what I learned.
WhistlePig Rye is Still a Teenager
Given its rustic name, retro labels, and squatty bottles, you’d think WhistlePig was a brand with a long history. Not true. If the company were a person, it wouldn’t even be drinking age.
In the early aughts, the classic cocktail renaissance vaulted rye onto the shelves of craft bars — it’s the smart set’s favored spirit for Manhattans, Old-Fashioneds, and many others.
But there were no high-end ryes for people who’d had their eyes opened to the bad-boy older brother of bourbon. Fifteen years ago there was no rye equivalent of the humongously expensive cult favorite Pappy Van Winkle bourbon or even more tolerably priced-up fan favorites like Blanton’s Single Barrel.
In 2007 entrepreneur Raj Bhakta saw the market opportunity, hired Dave Pickerell, master distiller at Maker’s Mark, and WhistlePig was off and running.
Its first release of WhistlePig rye in 2015 included only ryes distilled in Canada. Since then, the company has shifted its mix so more of its product is homemade, mixing stuff made to spec in Canada and Indiana with liquors from its own stills and finishing more of it at the farm.
It’s From the Wrong Part of the Country
Whiskey is supposed to come from Kentucky or Tennessee. Okay, small batches can come from artisanal distilleries practically anywhere, but still.
Betting that a significant national brand of booze could be built in Vermont — a state best known as the home of Ben & Jerry’s, maple syrup, and Bernie Sanders — was an act of faith. Or madness. The company was established on a falling-down dairy farm.
Implausibly, the scheme worked. WhistlePig sold over 12 million liters in 2020, according to Inc. magazine, and the venerated Moet-Hennessy has taken a (small) ownership stake in the company.
WhistlePig Rye’s Head Blender is a 28-year-old Woman Working Her First Whiskey Job
In 2018 Meghan Ireland had a chemical engineering degree from Clarkson University, worked in the hard cider business, and was looking for her next opportunity. Someone gifted her dad a bottle of WhistlePig rye. She loved it, and applied for a job through the company’s website. Improbably, she was hired.
Today, working with lead distiller Emily Harrison (an almost unheard-of combination of two women in the top production jobs at a whiskey house), she pushes WhistlePig into innovation. Harrison turns grain into white spirits; Ireland takes over to finish and age them brown.
The first product to carry Ireland’s creative stamp is called Boss Hog VII Magellan, which she finished in Spanish oak and Brazilian teakwood barrels.
“I went to my marketing team, I thought they were going to kill me,” she says. “I told them you have to come up with a story that connects Spain and Brazil. They came back with Magellan.” In one of his voyages, the 16th century explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed under the Spanish flag and visited among other places Brazil. “Totally genius work.”
A bottle of Magellan sells for $1,000 online.
Some WhistlePig Rye Products are Crazily Hyperlocal
WhistlePig refers to its Farmstock line with the coinage “triple terroir.” Or you might think of it as the Full Ver-Monty.
Farmstock is made with grains grown on its own farm, produced with water drawn from its own wells, and barreled in white oak harvested from trees on the property. The grains are distilled in its own barns and aged on-site through Vermont’s punishing winters and humid summers. (That’s quintuple terroir by my count.)
Currently, not everything that goes into the Farmstock blend is distilled on the farm, but with each release the percentage of local production increases. Ultimately the plan is to tie each barrel to a specific plot of land on the farm.
Once this is achieved, WhistlePig Farmstock may become the alcoholic beverage most comprehensively derived from a specific spot on Earth. In the meantime, its ambitious estate-made, grain-to-glass approach is quite rare.
Don’t Drink Its Most Affordable Product Straight
In 2019 the company introduced a product named PiggyBack at a much lower price point. $50 a bottle! Woo hoo!
Not so fast, Sluggo. PiggyBack is a mixing rye, designed for use in cocktails. Interestingly, this finally got WhistlePig into the world of craft cocktails, whose rise created the opening for a luxe brand of rye in the first place. The bottle has a longer neck, making it easier for bartenders to grab, and at first it was marketed primarily to restaurants and bars.
I’ve owned a couple of bottles myself. And I tasted PiggyBack several times in Vermont, offered as a low baseline against which the more elevated, hand-crafted products were compared.
So you can trust me when I tell you not to drink the stuff straight. It’s made with 100 percent rye grain, aged just six years, and at 100 proof it’ll torch your esophageal sphincter.
But it makes assertive cocktails, its strong rye base creating a sturdy canvas for any crafty bartender to work with. I had several cocktails with PiggyBack during my visit, including an Old Fashioned riff whose sweetener was WhistlePig’s own bottling of maple syrup. (They grow maple trees on the farm too.) It was spectacularly good — another form of the Full Ver-Monty.
WhistlePig is an Insanely Creative Company
In 2018, the company walked a teacup pig named Whistle down the catwalk at a Fashion Week show in New York. That was only the first in an escalating series of wild promotions of the brand.
In one of the company’s most audacious marketing and production schemes, it loaded an 18-wheeler with rye, some of it in barrels previously used by Napa’s Jordan winery to age a Bordeaux-style red, and drove it across the country. It paused for an event where a hyper-distilled batch of Whistle Pig was used to fuel a 700-horsepower Dodge Hellcat. The driver did donuts on a racetrack for the press.
When it reached California it swapped the booze into barrels from a Paso Robles micro-brewery. It then turned around and drove it all back — up and over the mountains, along Route 66, across the Mississippi, and back to the farm.
“This was our attempt to play with ‘dynamic aging,’” Ireland explains with a giggle. “We wanted to see what the sloshing, the different barrels, the temperature changes, and all that would do.”
Innovative? Wildly. Reviews have been generally but not wholly positive. You can pick up a bottle for $120.
The Products are Pretty Innovative Too
The company regularly produces limited time offers (LTOs) — small, often experimental batches that cajole new flavors from rye. It’s a common high-end boozemaker tactic that creates instant collectibles and superfan chatter.
One recent product with an Asian twist used barrels finished with lychee and oolong tea. A tribute blend to the late Robbie Robertson of the rock group The Band has a neck sealer made partly with melted vinyl LPs. ($120)
Every year sees another Boss Hog expression. Boss Hog IX, Siren’s Song, pays tribute to the Greek muses, its finish produced with barrels seasoned by fig nectar and a Peloponnesian liqueur made with clove, orange peel, and honey. A cheese plate with figs inspired that one, Ireland said. I got to taste Boss Hog IX: Lovely. And yes, figs.
The following year’s Boss Hog X, the Commandments, was produced in barrels finished with — swear to God — gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
You Win Some…
Not every experiment succeeds: Ireland tried to work with peppermint sticks left over from a Christmas party. “That didn’t work,” she says with a laugh.
Another time, inspired by her love of Irish coffee, Ireland treated a barrel with coffee beans and aged some rye in it. “It was horrible,” she says. But she’s determined to make the coffee thing work eventually.
I asked her what experiments she had coming up. She consulted her phone to see what she could tell me. She looked up with a smile. “That’s about all I can say for now.”
You might also like:
- At D.C.’s Death & Co., the Drinks Tell Stories
- An Interview with North American Whiskey Ambassador Douglas Kragel
Craig Stoltz writes Eat the World on Substack.
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