Uncooked: Coppersea Green Malt Rye

Coppersea is a craft distillery in New York's Hudson Valley. Their Green Malt Rye is made from 100% floor-malted rye which is distilled in direct fire stills and aged in 15 gallon new charred oak barrels. Interestingly, they call their rye "unkilned" because it is not cooked after malting, just ground, fermented and distilled.

This bottle was distilled in October 2014 and is listed as .6 years old.

Coppersea Green Malt Rye, .6 years old, Batch 15-2, 45% abv ($95 for 375 ml)

The nose is young but complex with strong grassy and grainy notes. These eventually settle and yield to some maraschino cherries. On the palate it starts raw and woody, like a whiskey aged in small barrels, but behind that there is a lot of flavor, including those grassy notes from the nose and a malty note, more like malted milk than the malt notes that typically come from rye malt. The finish has pencil shavings, dry autumn leaves and beer.

This has some of the raw notes I dislike in craft whiskeys, but there is more going on here. There is definitely some complexity on the palate that you don't see in most craft whiskeys. The more I taste it, the more interesting I find it and the more I want another sip.  That being said, $95 for a half bottle is a crazy price for this, which is too bad, because it's one of the few craft whiskeys I might recommend if the price were somewhere close to reasonable. 

Thanks to Christopher Dion of Young's Co. Market for the sample.