Dark Arts Whiskey House Straight Bourbon Whiskey

Dark Arts is an incredible blending house, curating very good foundation whiskey and turning it into liquid gold. And no wonder! Their President and Chief Alchemist, Macaulay Minton, holds the highest score ever on the “supertaster genetics test” that they give at the James B. Beam Distilling Institute at the University of Kentucky. Minton (or to give him his full title, Lord Colonel Macaulay Minton the Bourbon Swami) has basically done every job related to making a whiskey throughout his career in the industry, from growing up on a family farm in western KY, to distilling, to running the bottling line, to managing the largest single barrel program in the nation at Wilderness Trail Distillery. Although they aren’t running a still (yet), Dark Arts embraces how every step of the process of making whiskey is pivotal for the final product. In fact, their label bears 7 alchemical signs representing all the stages: crop growth, fermentation, distillation, maturation, finishing (or the spirit’s next journey), blending, and bottling.