Michter's US*1 Sour Mash

Product Information

A sour mash whiskey is a whiskey where the base recipe or mash is soured to provide producers and consumers with a consistent product that keeps on tasting great—batch after batch.

Today, yeast strains are carefully cultivated by scientists under laboratory conditions. But in the past, bakers and brewers would have had to keep strains alive by maintaining sourdough starters. Belle Meade is a Tennessee whiskey that is made using a unique blend of corn, rye, and barley. This brand is known for its sweet, smooth flavor and is perfect for sipping on a warm summer evening. Michter’s US*1 You’ve now been introduced to some of the best sour mash whiskey brands available on the market. Each of these brands has its own unique flavor profile, so it’s worth trying a few to find the one that suits your taste preferences. To create ideal conditions for the yeast, sour mash uses a portion of the spent mash from a previous ferment to start the upcoming mash. The spent mash changes the alkalinity and pH balance of the resulting mash and provides additional nutrients for the yeast during fermentation. Sour Mash vs Bourbon: Is There Actually a Difference?The Buffalo Trace experiment proved a few things to the distillers: the mash can be soured without using the slop from a previous fermentation. The lactobacillus bacteria has the same effect as preparing a sour mash. Still, the outcome is different in terms of taste.

Tasting notes mention a floral aroma and hints of freshly baked bread with a fresh and light taste in the mouth, and the finish is clean with a slight hint of leather. Using Spent Mash or SlopSome distilleries prefer to use the sweet mash method because it allows for greater control, although it's a much more manual process. However, there's more opportunity for bacteria to spread using the sweet mash method because the mash typically has a higher pH level. Distilleries that use this method need to be very aware of their sanitation processes. On the nose, the first influences here are that of charred oak and a faint smokiness, into heavy caramel and creme brulee sweetness. I’m getting both brown sugar and browned butter, into spice evoking a little sweet aniseed and cassia. I’ll be honest: This has been influenced by the casks to such a degree that if you handed it to me blind, based purely on nosing it I would almost certainly guess it was bourbon before anything else. This of course reflects the uniqueness of the American single malt style’s use of newly charred oak, which blurs the lines between it and other categories of American whiskey, while altering so much of the flavor profile consumers may expect to find in malt whiskey from other countries such as Scotland or Japan. Probing further on the nose here, you start to get more hints of characteristics that would be more unusual for the likes of bourbon, though: Floral tones in particular, and something evoking the fruit-and-spice combination of peppercorn berries.