291 Colorado Small Batch Rye Whiskey

A Rye to die for.

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."

His flagship expression — the Small Batch Colorado Rye Whiskey — is crafted using a signature mash bill of malted rye and corn, pot-distilled, aged for at least a year in American white oak barrels, then finished with toasted Colorado aspen staves they source from their neighbor. The fashion-photographer-turned-whiskey-maker sure is proving all those doubting Toms wrong — this release alone has won several gold medals at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and World Whiskies Awards, among others.