Old Potrero from Hotaling, originally Anchor Distilling, is a rye whiskey that I first learned about through a local bartender over a decade ago but truly fell in love with years later. One of my friends working for Hotaling needed a hand in their booth at a whisky event in town, and I gladly accepted the gig.
While she took over the Kavalan product line, I sung the merits of Old Potrero in an uphill struggle to explain how single malt rye whiskey could be as beautiful as single malt barley whisky to a crowd of mostly Scotch aficionados.
Rye was the primary grain for distillation in America from the Colonial era until the late 1850s, when corn took over. Rye grows rather well in the poor climate and soils of the northeastern U.S. It was also a grain that German and northern European settlers were familiar with from their home countries. In fact, rye whiskey got so popular that the newly formed United States government, which taxed the product to relieve Revolutionary War debt, which led to a farmer-distillers protest and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.
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Many of these whiskeys were being made in a Monongahela style, named after a river running through Pennsylvania into West Virginia. Distillers used unmalted rye combined with either malted barley or malted rye. This spicy high-rye style was a standard offering in bars and liquor stores until Prohibition, when rye distilleries were shuttered and repurposed.
Originally, distilleries used the pot and three-chambered stills, which produced heavy-bodied spirits. But after Prohibition, bourbon distilleries picked up the business and switched to large column stills that produced lighter whiskeys.
From the 1930s until 1993, all rye legally produced in the U.S. was made bourbon-style using column stills. Furthermore, corn became a major component of rye whiskey. Because rye was expensive and difficult to use, rye whiskey laws changed. In order to legally be considered rye whiskey, distilleries only needed 51 percent of its namesake grain in the mash bill. Pre-Prohibition rye whiskeys used much more.
In 1993, Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco—America's first craft brewery—added a distillery and fired up his pot still in an attempt to make a historically authentic American spirit akin to what was produced by George Washington and his peers. In contrast to the modern rye style, Fritz decided to make a 100 percent rye whiskey, which George Washington mentioned in 1790s correspondences as his favorite.
Unlike 18th century distillers who assembled 100-percent rye with a combination of malted and unmalted grains, Fritz looked to Scotland and decided to make a single malt rye whiskey. Fritz found malted rye to be “richer, warmer, friendlier” in flavor, as malting reduces the dry and grainy aspect of rye to make it smoother with subdued spice notes.
Fritz is a big fan of the Manhattan, so it's no surprise that his spirit works amazingly well in that cocktail. However, I find myself instead sipping on it neat to take in all the elegance of this unique spirit.
Enjoyed straight, my Old Potrero bottling without an age statement—meaning that it's at least four years old—presents a nose full of rye spice, caramel, toasted wood, pine, and hints of spearmint. On the tongue, the whiskey opens up with toffee, peppery, pine, minty, and soft fruit flavors.
While some of the early Old Potrero batches were as young as a year old and labeled as 18th century style, recent releases are six years old with some being much older, including a 16-year bottled-in-bond offering this past year.
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Like single malt Scotch, the distillery ages older spirits in used barrels, which contribute less character and allow time and micro-oxygenation to do its trick. My non-aged statement whiskey and the current six-year-old bottling, on the other hand, tout new charred oak barrels akin to regular rye and bourbon to give the spirit plenty of structure in that time frame. Keep in mind that the San Francisco climate, somewhat similar to Scotland's, ages whiskey slower than Kentucky.
I can see why the Scotch fanatics at the event years ago were taken aback. Many had not considered that “single malt” could refer to anything other than barley. For those who did taste it, despite being made in a parallel way, rye's flavor profile has more body and spice than the barley they were used to.
Old Potrero is also odd to American whiskey lovers familiar with Kentucky-style rye or even the newer high rye whiskeys. Moreover, column stills produce a thinner spirit than Fritz’s pot still.
While those column ryes are perfect for cocktails like old fashioneds, I find Old Potrero creeping into my repertoire when I want to sip a spirit like I do my Speyside whiskies.
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