GOING ANALOG
Todd Leopold has done the distilling equivalent of going back to vinyl; putting away the MP4s and earbuds, replacing the CD player with a turntable, ditching solid state for a tube amplifier and cranking up the vintage JBLs.
For the devoted followers of this Colorado craft distillery, the release this spring of Leopold Bros Three Chamber Rye Whiskey is truly a whiskey geek’s dram come true
Leopold has turned back the clock 123 years, to 1898, when rye whiskey was thick in its heyday. That was the year when the US Internal Revenue Service commissioned researchers CA Crampton and LM Tolman with the enviable task of determining what actually defines whiskey as whiskey. Published in 1907, the Crampton and Tolman Paper serves as a blueprint for reverse engineering whiskey styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“They looked at what the grist bills were,” said Leopold. “They looked at what kind of stills they used. They looked at the entry proof. They looked at, ‘Was the warehouse heated?’ They looked at all of these different contributing things.”
In 31 distilleries studied by Crampton and Tolman, every plant that made Bourbon used a column still. And facilities that made rye used a three-chamber still, sometimes called a charge still. Even Hiram Walker
