Leopold Bros. "25th Anniversary Edition - The Foeder Series" A Blend of Straight Rye Whiskies

750ml bottle

55% abv 

For years, we’ve toyed with the idea of blending the different styles of whiskey we create at Leopold Bros into a limited release. Taking inspiration from some of Scotland’s great producers, we found ourselves particularly enamored with vatted whiskies that were given time to marry inside large wooden casks, or what the beer world refers to as a foeder.

Seeking a vessel that would allow for such an homage, we reached out to our friends at New Belgium Brewing who, as luck would have it, had a gigantic French oak foeder they were willing to part with. We knew exactly what we wanted to fill it with from the moment it arrived, as we had been experimenting in advance: 8 year old Three Chamber rye whiskey with 5 year old Maryland style rye whiskey at full proof.

Tasting the evolution of our Three Chamber rye whiskey over the last few years has been quite the journey, but discovering how that whiskey improves and enhances other styles of whiskey was perhaps the highlight. The viscosity and weight of the Three Chamber rye adds depth and body to our Maryland style rye whiskey, flushing it out with added sweetness and viscosity. Think baking spices and stone fruits galore.

After marrying together in our French oak foeder, we bottled the resulting blend at barrel entry proof with no filtration for a full-flavored and robust American whiskey.

The Leopold Bros Maryland Style Rye is an homage to a Pre-Prohibition regional style of whiskey making that has been lost for over fifty years. Immensely popular with Union Soldiers stationed in Washington DC during the Civil War, Maryland rye became renowned for its softer, fruitier character and its reputation only grew from there. After Prohibition, many of Maryland’s distilleries were sold off for their property value, or turned over to industrial enterprises looking to capitalize on Maryland rye’s reputation with a cheaper substitute. The last Maryland rye distillery from that era shuttered its doors in 1972. Thanks to a friendly collector, Todd Leopold was able to sample numerous bottles of real Maryland Rye Whiskey from 60+ years ago and catalogued their flavor profiles. Working from those tasting notes, the Leopold Bros’ Maryland Style Rye Whiskey is made with a mash bill of 65% rye, 15% corn, and 20% of our beloved floor malted barley. Using a variant of yeast that brought out the fruitiness of the rye, rather than its spiciness, the whiskey was pot distilled and aged five years in our Colorado dunnage warehouses. The resulting spirit is fruity and floral at its core with a soft, buttery finish that emulates the rye whiskies of Maryland’s historic past. 

Leopold Bros. is an independently owned distillery founded by brothers Todd and Scott Leopold. Founded in 1999 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the mid-2000s, Todd and Scott relocated Leopold Bros. operations to their home state of Colorado to focus solely on distilling; they built their own distillery in 2014. They use only the highest quality ingredients from family farms and orchards like the rye fields located only twenty-five miles north of their distillery, the barley growing in Colorado's San Luis Valley, the Palisade peaches on Colorado's Western Slope, and more.