High West Cabernet Cask Collection Bourbon Whiskey

You don’t know many distilleries anywhere in the world with overnight success stories like High West (except for maybe Whistle Pig), because they really don’t exist. They truly are an anomaly out of the Mountain West.

This distillery was started by a husband and wife in 2006. He’s a former biochemist who saw the parallels between fermentation, the distilling process, and his own biochemistry work. He took a trip to Kentucky and decided to give it a go on his own.

Deciding to set up shop in Park City, Utah, where there was practically no whiskey history, seemed like a curious choice, but it has proven to be anything but. In just ten years, that small distillery with humble roots and a 250-gallon still turned into a bustling business that blew the roof off the place when they were named Whiskey Advocate’s 2016 Distillery of the Year.

Since that time, they’ve been struggling to meet the overwhelming demand. We got a few small allotments of the uber-popular “Midwinter Night’s Dram” series, but we’ve never been able to get a real offer until today. My patience has finally paid off.