My name is Michael Booth. I’m former Master Blender for Wiser’s Whiskies. I’m now the Wiser’s Brand Ambassador.
In the mid 1800’s, there were four or five whisky barons that really, really have an impact globally in the whisky market especially the United States. One of those whisky barons was as a gentleman named J.P. Wiser. He started his distillery in Prescott, Ontario in 1857. The first brand of whisky that he had in his portfolio is this one, Red Letter rye.
This was his brand in 1857. I think it was one of the first brands of Canadian whiskies. This is the 150th anniversary of the Wiser Distillery to celebrate that we’re bringing back Red Letter rye this year. This is the whisky as it was made 150 years ago. The reason I’ve say it’s similar to whiskies made at that time is that there is no caramel added, no artificial color. It isn’t chill-filtered. Chill-filtering has some good things. It stabilizes the look of whisky but it also strips out a lot of flavor.
So in this particular case we didn’t want the flavors stripped out. We want to be as it was. The strength is also a little bit higher, it’s 45% alcohol as oppose to 40. So by doing that you’re also increasing the flavor of the components as well as the alcohol. The whiskies age and use Bourbon casts for about 10 years and then after that the whisky is drained out of those bills and put into new charred American oak barrels.
This is for about 150 bases, so it is really a doubled barreled whisky, 150 days in the second barrel. The charred new wood contributes the flavors that are very typical of Canadians that would be toffee, caramel, butterscotch, and vanilla, all of the flavors that come from the caramelization of the sugars in the wood.
The color that you see here is the color that’s extractive from the wood. There is nothing added. There’s nothing taken away. It’s a traditional Canadian whisky and very, very smooth, very special, very sweet, very well balanced and I think any person who really appreciates good whisky could really enjoy this product.
So, it’s really going back in time and we created the J.P. Wiser. We might have produced 150 years ago. So that’s really the story and it’s a limited edition, 6000 bottles just to introduce the past weekend to the LCBO stores in Ontario. It’s going to be available across Canada just for family.
They’re distilled to be lighter so they’re easy to drink. In general, they’re very adaptable to the cocktails but we also know how to make sipping whiskies, you know especially sweet whiskies that you savor and this is one of them and I would say it’s a unique flavor profile. As I said that’s predominantly toffee, caramel, vanilla, and oak.
That’s pretty much the personality of Canadian whisky. The Canadian whiskies are as popular in the United States, in Canada and other parts of the world as our Scotch whiskies, R.S. whiskies, Japanese whiskies, and Bourbon. So, we’re the world player in the whisky business.
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