291 Colorado Small Batch Bourbon Whiskey

Dunkin’ staves and taking names.

You remember Michael Myers. Masked face, coveralls, chases Jamie Lee Curtis around with a knife? Well, this one has nothing to do with any of that. This Michael Meyers was a photographer working in New York City. But before that, he was a country boy raised in the rolling, Whiskey-soaked hills of Tennessee and Georgia. After the events of 9/11 he left the big city and returned to the country — this time the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at the edge of Colorado Springs. In 2011, he built his first still using old photographic copper plates from his previous life and started making Whiskey. And to carry forward the character of his new country home the small-batch Whiskeys from Distillery 291 are finished with wood staves found in the mountains above his home. He calls it, “Handmade the Colorado Way.”

The 291 Colorado Small Batch Bourbon Whiskey is crafted using their signature corn-heavy mash bill, pot-distilled, aged for at least a year in heavily charred oak barrels, then finished with toasted Colorado aspen staves right from their neighbor’s land. Whatever Meyers is doing sure seems to be working and he has the awards to prove it — the coveted Double Gold from the 2016 edition of San Francisco World Spirits Competition among them.