A. Smith Bowman Distillery, well known for making-award winning bourbons, including this year’s Best Bourbon in the World, has expanded its offerings to include a new line of experimental spirits. The line will include a wide variety of distilled spirits, including the aforementioned gin, and will grow to include different expressions of rums, vodkas, and brandies. The Experimental Series will explore a wide variety of spirits delving into unique recipes, wood types, exotic fermentables, and the use of local ingredients such as grapes, apples, pears, grains, and much more.
The first offering, a gin titled Rye Expectations, is very limited and will only be available at the A. Smith Bowman Distillery Visitor Center. It is a one-time only release, and is the first release ever from A. Smith Bowman’s new custom microstill, George, installed in early 2015. This gin is a custom recipe created by Master Distiller Brian Prewitt, distilled three times and crafted using a distinct rye grain base including Virginia rye and a botanical mix of juniper, coriander Spanish orange, and angelica.
Tasting notes from Master Distiller Prewitt describe this new gin as having a “soft floral nose with coriander and orange peel, nutty rye, and delicate juniper. The taste is sweet and soft in the mouth with the juniper and orange peel leading the way, giving way to the angelica and rye.”
Rye Expectations will be offered for sale at the A. Smith Bowman Distillery Visitor Center in Fredericksburg, VA on Saturday, Nov. 19th. It is very limited and is not likely to be repeated. However, new experimental spirits series will be released about twice per year, and may be for sale in additional outlets in Virginia and possibly other states.
Like the Abraham Bowman Bourbon experiments, this new series of experiments will have a small rectangle label on the front of the bottle on each release that explains the provenance and will be hand numbered, with the release number and bottle number.
This new line of experiments will include distilled spirits from a wide range of expressions, but all experiments which are whiskeys will still be released under the Abraham Bowman line.
Rye Expectations is bottled in 375 mL and will be priced at $34.99. It is 90 proof.
About A. Smith Bowman
A. Smith Bowman’s distilling roots date back to the years before Prohibition when the Bowman family had a granary and dairy farm in Sunset Hills, Virginia. They used excess grain from the family estate to distill spirits. In 1934, after the Repeal of Prohibition, Abram Smith Bowman and his sons continued the family tradition and built a more modern distillery in Fairfax County, Virginia called Sunset Hills Farm. The Distillery was moved in 1988 and is now nestled in Spotsylvania County near the city of Fredericksburg, 60 miles away from the original location.
As a small and privately owned company, A. Smith Bowman Distillery continues the time-honored traditions on which it was founded. Considered a micro-distillery by today’s standards, A. Smith Bowman produces an assortment of hand-crafted spirits distilled from only the finest natural ingredients and using the latest technology. This micro-distillery focuses on the production of premium spirits honoring the legacy of Virginia’s first settlers. Its various brands have won more than 100 awards in the past five years, including “World’s Best Bourbon” in 2016 for its Abraham Bowman Port Finished Bourbon at the World Whisky Awards. For more information on A. Smith Bowman, please visit www.asmithbowman.com.
