Southern Star American Single Malt Whiskey - Cask Strength

For this "Best of the Best" lineup, we HAD to revisit the distillery that brought us what might be our favorite single barrel bourbon ever for our March 2023 box! That Southern Star Paragon Wheated Straight Bourbon Whiskey cask was the sister cask of the barrel that was the first non-Kentucky Bourbon to win Best in Category and Best in Show, and it shattered many of our members' preconceptions about what craft whiskey could be. Plus, the accolades keep coming, as they just earned the coveted "Bubble Cap" award from the American Distilling Institute as the 2025 Distillery of the Year! For those of you who might be learning about them for the first time, Pete and Vienna Barger founded this incredible distillery in 2013 and have been producing whiskey all along the way! Their primary business is as a contract distiller for other brands, specializing in giving their clients a wide array of options to tweak their distillation process and create a product that is uniquely their own. Statesville, NC, used to be the liquor capital of the world prior to Prohibition, and the Bargers knew it was the perfect place to bet on themselves the old-fashioned way, going all in by emptying their bank accounts and working multiple jobs to make it work. This Southern Star American Single Malt is an incredible follow-up that we had to include in our lineup after it blew our tasting panel away with its unique flavors and amazing texture. It's pretty much the perfect example of how Southern Distilling goes about making their whiskeys, using traditional processes when helpful, but feeling free to innovate where they feel it's needed. This whiskey isn't just a copy-paste of how single malt is made in other countries, but takes advantage of American practices, being distilled on a column versus a pot still. Pete says, "It's not going to be foreign to someone who likes Scotch, but it's going to be different. It's not going to be foreign to someone who likes Bourbon or Rye, but it's going to be different." Plus, it's the first cask-strength single malt we've ever included!