Kansas City Whiskey (J. Rieger & Co.)

We have our good friend Matt to thank for tipping us onto J. Rieger & Co.! Their brand story has just about everything: an actually-true family story from the 1800s, a revitalized historical blending practice of adding sherry to whiskey, a newly-defined regional category of whiskey, and (most importantly) damn good juice in the bottle. The Rieger family legacy is strong in Kansas City, with Austro-Hungarian Jacob Rieger coming to the region in the early 1880s and establishing a family legacy of founding businesses, ranging from a grocery store to a hotel to, you guessed it, a distillery. As Jacob’s great-great-great-grandson, Andy Rieger, says of his forefather, “He was a doer, like most immigrants.” Andy is the Co-Founder and President of J. Rieger, and was drawn (somewhat begrudgingly) into the planning processes to bring his family history back to life through a realization that he might be the perfect person for the job. His background in finance gives him an eye for the little things that allow companies to thrive, and his personal connection to the original brand attracted an all-star lineup of luminaries from the beverage industry who recognized that there was something special here.

And their Kansas City Whiskey is the perfect example of that special something. Not only is it incredibly delicious, but also is both a new classification of whiskey (they lobbied for the TTB to recognize it as a style) and a revived process that fell out of regular use after the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897. They found records in their family’s heirloom collection showing that blending sherry was in regular use for the original iteration of J. Rieger & Co., so it was fitting to re-establish this as the regional hallmark for Kansas City! Andy says that they are “borrowing a historical style, but creating it today for the modern consumer.” This is a blend artfully crafted, with every whiskey component distilled and aged separately, before being brought together with the imported 15 year Oloroso sherry from Williams & Humbert in Jerez. As Andy says, “I like to describe this as a whiskey salad. We are the chef, the salad preparers, and the bottle is our bowl, what we want to present to you.” The “secret sauce” of the blend is their light corn whiskey, which provides a lightness to the final product that allows for the sherry to shine through, even though it can’t legally go above 2.5% of the batch. This is a whiskey so consistent that you can set your clock by it, and we know that it will be a staple on our members’ shelves for years to come!