Smoke Wagon Bourbon closed out 2020 with the type of viral, cult following we’ve never really seen before from a “new distillery”. It’s one the coolest bottle designs we’ve ever seen with embossed guns and roses patterned throughout the dark brown, slim wine bottle shaped silhouette.

The liquid inside is a high rye mashbill (35% rye) sourced from the good folks at MGP. The bottle features a wax coined inspired by the Morgan Silver Dollar. There’s a pair of revolver handguns on the coin along with the phrase ‘Bibamus Moriendum Est.’ (Let us drink, for we shall die).

The curation of barrels is clearly a central theme in bourbon. We’ve enjoyed several MGP offerings from Bull Run, Belle Meade, Bardstown etc. Even if the source is reportedly the same we still have excitement about exploring the next one.

Some of this is straight forward, the Lawrenceburg IN facility has 5 bourbon mashbills, 3 rye and 2 wheated bourbon. Even when hear something is sourced it doesn’t mean you’ve experienced that particular profile before.

For Smoke Wagon their Small Batch is a mingling 8 and 4 year old barrels from a specific warehouse give them their signature flavor variant. Small Batch was a Gold Medal Winner at San Francisco World Spirits Competition back in 2016.

The buzz around Smoke Wagon in Chicago rivaled that of any distillery we could think of as Single Barrel and Store Picks from Garfields, Binnys and Osito’s Tap sold out immediately.

Part of the excitement could be attributed to retailers that don’t want to play games with allocation that the big guys force on to you. Some stores refuse to sell any goddamn Fireball cases to gain the right to purchase seasonal offerings from Buffalo Trace.

The result is that you can walk into a boutique shop like Off Premise in Lincoln Park and sample Remus Reserve or Drifless Glen. Talk with a local retailer can get lost in the stories about brands you know nothing about..soon you forget about missing out on E.H. Taylor Single Barrel. The reward for tapping into a community of lushes that live near you outweighs paying $800 on secondary for Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye.

The story goes that a screenwriter from movies like Die Hard With a Vengeance and Jumanji became friends with a bar owner in Eagle Rock, California back in 2004. The pair hit it off and decided they should open a bar concept in Las Vegas in 2007. The bar project led founding partners Aaron Chepnik and Jonathan Hensleigh to open the Nevada H&C Distilling Company in 2012.

For more on our thoughts about the cult of Smoke Wagon be sure to check out Ep 24 of The Neat Pour Podcast - Who Wants The Smoke?

—The Neat Pour

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