Crater Lake Estate Rye Whiskey

A true “estate” Rye Whiskey made from 100% rye grain and aged five years to deliver the heat.

Bendistillery is a play on words. The company is located in Bend, Oregon, and they are in the distilling business. Push those two words together and you get Bendistillery economically using a single letter “d.” They proudly claim the title of “America’s Most Award Winning Small Batch Distillery.” Exactly how many awards is that? We stopped counting when we ran out of fingers and toes of everyone in the office at the time. They own and manage three brands for intoxication consumables — Crater lake Spirits, Bend Spirits, and Ablis CBD Infusions. Crater Lake Spirits came first in 1996.

“Estate” is not a word you see very often these days, but it means something important. If a Spirit is a true “estate” release, it means that everything… we mean EVERYTHING… is done on site in a single location. In the case of Whiskey, that means growing the grains, malting, milling, distilling, aging, AND bottling.

Crater Lake Estate Rye Whiskey is a true estate Whiskey. They even get the water from a private 745-foot deep well drilled into the native lava rock. The mash bill is 100% rye farmed on their little plot of fourteen acres. It’s aged for five years and bottled at nearly perfect 46.5% ABV. As you can imagine, they are only able to produce a few barrels of this dram per year, so the words “limited edition” are not marketing hype.

Smartass Corner:
Crater Lake is a large, deep, very pure lake in Oregon formed by a collapsing volcano. It is part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc containing twenty major volcanoes and more than 4,000 minor ones stretching from Northern California into Canada.