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“Gimme a shot o’ rye!” One out of ten bad Westerns has this line in it somewhere, followed by a bartender uncorking an unlabeled bottle and pouring a shot of whiskey for the hairy customer.
“Gimme two bottles of rye!” Ray Milland bawls at the liquor store clerk in the 1946 classic The Lost Weekend. “Gimme the cheapest you got, none of that 12 years in the barrel shishi stuff. Whiskey’s all the same.”
And those were the days when rye had a good reputation! “Rye” was synonymous with “rotgut” for years, but things are changing as more people discover what a great-tasting bargain rye whiskey is. Rye has a whole new aura of connoisseurship about it now.
Rye whiskey used to be America’s spirit, the drink that warmed the Continental soldiers at Valley Forge when the British navy made it too hard to get rum from the West Indies. Pennsylvania and Maryland distillers rose to the occasion. They went overboard on liberty in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, refusing to pay federal taxes on their rye whiskey till George Washington rode to western Pennsylvania with 15,000 troops and convinced them otherwise. Pretty funny, considering that Washington was a rye distiller himself!
The rye distillers in western Pennsylvania stayed behind when their more footloose brethren floated down the Ohio to Kentucky, where they would distill their whiskey from corn and stamp it with the name of the county it came from — Bourbon. But along the waters of the Monongahela, rye was king, and so it was for years, until Prohibition changed everything.
Prohibition brought a flood of Canadian whisky across the border. People got used to its lighter flavor and true American rye never recovered. There wasn’t a lot of it around, anyway. “When the Kentucky distilleries started back up after Prohibition they were strapped for cash,” says Jim Beam master distiller Jerry Dalton. “If I had been a distiller back then, I would have made bourbon rather than rye because the grain in the mash bill would have been a little less expensive, especially with the cost of hauling it to the distillery.” Even tougher, no whiskey was made during Prohibition, and it was two years after Repeal before any new whiskey was out, and it was too young, too harsh, too hot: rotgut.
The rye distilleries didn’t survive, and the brands were bought up by the bourbon distillers. Today Jim Beam and Wild Turkey distill their own rye whiskeys; Jim Beam also makes Old Overholt, and Heaven Hill bought the rights to distill Rittenhouse Rye and Pikesville Rye.
For years these whiskeys were tiny curiosities that slowly declined in sales. Calls for rye at bars were met with Canadian whisky, most of which have little rye in them these days. But about seven years ago, distillers noticed a slight uptick in sales. “We have been seeing a new interest,” Wild Turkey master distiller Jimmy Russell told me. “Japan is beginning to be a good rye market. Some Scotch drinkers are starting to drink rye.”
Rye’s made pretty much the same way bourbon is, only 51 percent of the mash bill has to be rye. If it’s so similar to bourbon, what makes it different? What does rye add? “Well, that’s kind of hard to say,” Russell said. “That’s like eating white bread and rye bread. They’re different, but how do you describe that difference? A lot of people won’t eat rye bread, they just don’t like the taste.”
The taste of rye whiskey is easy to describe: powerful. Rye can shock you, it’s so full of flavor. Rye’s a natural for folks who like big beers, it’s like fireworks going off on your tongue: spice, mint, rye and heat. Aged ryes, like Sazerac Rye or Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye, add layers of warm honey to that flavor, but never enough to subdue it.
My favorite way to drink rye is in hot weather, with a lot of ice and a good ginger ale. Throw a fat shot of Pikesville or Old Overholt in a tall glass full of ice, top it up with ginger ale, squeeze a lemon wedge into it, and stir once; a Rye Presbyterian. Or make the more elaborate Horse’s Neck: take a lemon and peel it in a continuous 3/4” strip, starting with the end of the lemon and making a sharp curl as you do. Hang the crook made by starting at the end over the edge of a tall glass and twine the peel down in, fill the glass with ice, rye, and ginger ale. There’s a synergy to the rye, ginger ale, and lemon that makes a great drink.
Try rye. It’s an all-American drink, it’s delicious, and it’s cheap. How can you go wrong?
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