Friday, February 26, 2016
2016 Auction Poster
With many thanks to Jen Sessums for the outstanding artistry, we proudly thirstily present to you the 2016 Murch Whiskey Club Poster. Cheers!
2016 Whiskey Club Menu
The 2016 whiskey bar menu is out and, once again, it's going to be epic!!
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Monday, February 1, 2016
2016 Commemorative Glasses Arrived - Secure Yours Today
The 2016 glasses will sport both our own Whiskey Club logo and the Auction Logo.
All Founders do not pay the $30 fee at the auction to taste premium whiskeys from these one-of-a-kind glasses. Secure your place as a Founder today by donating one of these great bottles to the Whiskey Club.
All Founders do not pay the $30 fee at the auction to taste premium whiskeys from these one-of-a-kind glasses. Secure your place as a Founder today by donating one of these great bottles to the Whiskey Club.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Murch Whiskey Bar Is Back! Drink From The Epic Whiskey Bar
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| Murch Whiskey Club Scotch Glass |
The Club’s Founders have scoured the city assembling an amazing flight of whiskeys for the Auction’s “Whiskey Bar”. Club Members can sample the assorted whiskeys that include single malt scotches, rare bourbons & ryes, and even an exclusive Irish whiskey (see list below). Members also receive a receive a commemorative Murch Whiskey Club glass (shown to the right).
How do you become a Member of the Murch Whiskey Club?
You can become a Member by simply by providing a $30 donation. On Saturday night just belly-up to the Whiskey Bar, provide your auction bid number to the barkeep, get your glass, and let your palate be amazed. You can take home your Murch Whiskey Club glass at the end of the night.
Whiskeys include:
- Jameson 18, Irish whiskey (about)
- WhistlePig Boss Hog 12 (about)
- Johnnie Walker Blue Label, scotch (about)
- Mortlach Rare Old, scotch (about)
- High West: A Midwinter Night Dram, rye (about)
- Lock Stock & Smoking Barrel 13, rye (about)
- Glenlivet Nadurra Oloroso, scotch (about)
- Mortlach Rare Old, scotch (about)
- Bowmore 18, scotch (about)
- Macallan 18 Sherry Oak, scotch (about)
- Highland Park 18
- Abraham Bowman, Virginia bourbon (about)
- Four Roses Private Selection, bourbon (about)
- Blanton's, bourbon (about)
- Bookers, bourbon (about)
- Jefferson's Ocean, bourbon (about)
- Basil Hayden, bourbon (about)
- Wathen's Old Medley 12 (about)
For more information about how you can support the Whiskey Bar at the Auction contact Tim Lordan tlordan@gmail.com.
Credits: Murch Whiskey Club logo designed by Jenifer Sessums.
Credits: Murch Whiskey Club logo designed by Jenifer Sessums.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Murch Whiskey Club Commemorative Glass 2015
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| Murch Whiskey Club Scotch Glass |
Here is the Murch Whiskey Club Limited Edition scotch glass that Members will receive at the Murch Auction on March 21. For $30 Members will receive this collectible scotch glass along with five samples of premium scotch or bourbon.
There are a limited number of glasses and drams and it's first come / first served.
For more information about how you can support the Whiskey Bar at the Auction contact Tim Lordan tlordan@gmail.com.
Credits: Murch Whiskey Club logo designed by Jenifer Sessums.
Credits: Murch Whiskey Club logo designed by Jenifer Sessums.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Bourbon Prices Expected to Rise in 2015
The new year may not be so happy for many of you since bourbon prices are expected to rise dramatically in 2015 according to this story.
The saving grace for 2015 will be the Murch Whiskey Club bar at the Murch Auction. The Chairmen are busy at work preparing for this year's whiskey bar. Stay tuned for more details.
- The Chairmen
Listen: Here
If you could make a lot of bourbon whiskey these days, you could be distilling real profits. Bourbon sales in this country are up 36 percent in the past five years.
But you'd need new wooden barrels for aging your new pristine product. Simple white oak barrels, charred on the inside to increase flavorand add color, are becoming more precious than the bourbon.
Making these barrels is a very old craft, almost an art, called cooperage. The Scots-Irish who settled in Appalachia could do this: Cut the white oak boards into staves, steam them to bend, make metal hoops to hold the barrel tight.
You can see this process is the small town of Lebanon, Ky. This cooperage is one of several owned by a company called Independent Stave, which is based in Missouri and is the largest maker of whiskey barrels in the world.
As the barrels take shape they are carried, rolled, and conveyed — sometimes overhead — to the different work stations. Starting out as a collection of oak staves, they are fitted together, steamed, bound with steel and seared with flame before arriving at the end ready for inspection.
"The barrel has water and air in it," says Leo Smith, the supervisor for the last stop on the production line. "They're looking for any kind of leak or defect in the barrel. ... He's gonna put a plug in that barrel where it's leaking, a small plug in it, and stop that leak."
The plug is a simple piece of cedar, whittled by hand.
Independent Stave is a family-owned company and they don't talk much about how many people work there or how many barrels they make. But plant manager Barry Shewmaker does say that production has doubled in the past two years.
"We're seen an increase, and it looks like it's ... there's no end in sight," Shewmaker says.
Independent Stave makes barrels for the big distilleries — Kentucky brand names you might have tasted — and so far Independent is staying steady with demand.
But there's another need for oak barrels: very small craft distilleries starting to make bourbon, vodka, gin or rum. Their output is low — sort of like a drop compared to the big brands — but someone does have to make the barrels.
Kevin and Paul McLaughlin moved to Louisville from Scotland and are joint presidents of Kelvin Cooperage here. For more than 20 years they've been crafting wine barrels, and they buy used bourbon barrels to fix up and sell to the whiskey trade in Scotland and Ireland.
But now a different market has come right to them: They're making white oak barrels for the new craft distillers. Paul McLaughlin demonstrates the charring process — they put oak scraps in the finished barrel — and soon the flames are visibile. In the beginning it's called "toast."
"We start smelling kind of a baked bread — that smell, that's what we like, that's when we know we're getting a toast layer, and once we have the toast layer we'll let the barrel ignite, like that" says Paul McLaughlin. "You get baked bread, you get kind of a marzipan — really, really nice smell."
There may be as many as 700 small craft distillers in the U.S. today, and that number is going up fast.
"Some of them call and say 'I'm making whiskey, I've got my stills going and I need barrels, and I didn't think there would ever be a problem getting barrels,' " Kevin McLaughlin says.
At the Kelvin Cooperage in Louisville they are working overtime, but there's so much demand that the company estimates they could sell all the barrels they could make next year, 10 times over.
The saving grace for 2015 will be the Murch Whiskey Club bar at the Murch Auction. The Chairmen are busy at work preparing for this year's whiskey bar. Stay tuned for more details.
- The Chairmen
As Bourbon Booms, Demand For Barrels Is Overflowing
By Noah Adams
Originally published on Mon December 29, 2014 6:35 pmListen: Here
If you could make a lot of bourbon whiskey these days, you could be distilling real profits. Bourbon sales in this country are up 36 percent in the past five years.
But you'd need new wooden barrels for aging your new pristine product. Simple white oak barrels, charred on the inside to increase flavorand add color, are becoming more precious than the bourbon.
Making these barrels is a very old craft, almost an art, called cooperage. The Scots-Irish who settled in Appalachia could do this: Cut the white oak boards into staves, steam them to bend, make metal hoops to hold the barrel tight.
You can see this process is the small town of Lebanon, Ky. This cooperage is one of several owned by a company called Independent Stave, which is based in Missouri and is the largest maker of whiskey barrels in the world.
As the barrels take shape they are carried, rolled, and conveyed — sometimes overhead — to the different work stations. Starting out as a collection of oak staves, they are fitted together, steamed, bound with steel and seared with flame before arriving at the end ready for inspection.
"The barrel has water and air in it," says Leo Smith, the supervisor for the last stop on the production line. "They're looking for any kind of leak or defect in the barrel. ... He's gonna put a plug in that barrel where it's leaking, a small plug in it, and stop that leak."
The plug is a simple piece of cedar, whittled by hand.
Independent Stave is a family-owned company and they don't talk much about how many people work there or how many barrels they make. But plant manager Barry Shewmaker does say that production has doubled in the past two years.
"Once we have the toast layer we'll let the barrel ignite," says Paul McLaughlin of Kelvin Cooperage in Louisville, Ky.
Independent Stave makes barrels for the big distilleries — Kentucky brand names you might have tasted — and so far Independent is staying steady with demand.
But there's another need for oak barrels: very small craft distilleries starting to make bourbon, vodka, gin or rum. Their output is low — sort of like a drop compared to the big brands — but someone does have to make the barrels.
Kevin and Paul McLaughlin moved to Louisville from Scotland and are joint presidents of Kelvin Cooperage here. For more than 20 years they've been crafting wine barrels, and they buy used bourbon barrels to fix up and sell to the whiskey trade in Scotland and Ireland.
Aging bourbon at a distillery in Kentucky.
"We start smelling kind of a baked bread — that smell, that's what we like, that's when we know we're getting a toast layer, and once we have the toast layer we'll let the barrel ignite, like that" says Paul McLaughlin. "You get baked bread, you get kind of a marzipan — really, really nice smell."
There may be as many as 700 small craft distillers in the U.S. today, and that number is going up fast.
"Some of them call and say 'I'm making whiskey, I've got my stills going and I need barrels, and I didn't think there would ever be a problem getting barrels,' " Kevin McLaughlin says.
At the Kelvin Cooperage in Louisville they are working overtime, but there's so much demand that the company estimates they could sell all the barrels they could make next year, 10 times over.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Japanese Whiskey Obsession / Cherry Blossom Whiskeys of the Month
Murch Whiskey Club Founders and Members:
Continuing on with Cherry Blossom season we thought we would direct your attention to a fascinating NPR story about Japan's obsession with American nostalgia. The piece, which aired last night, described how a Japanese bar owner has accumulated perhaps the most expansive collections of centuries-old whiskeys in the world. You can listen to the story here and we have pasted an excerpt of the text below. The Smithsonian Magazine ran a longer piece about Rogin's Tavern [here]. The author's Flickr photostream is here. Perhaps the next Murch Whiskey Club outing can be to Rogin's Tavern, just outside of Osaka.
Also, as you watch the Cherry Blossoms start to bloom after this brutal winter we recommend a couple of japanese whiskeys this April. The Hakushu 12 yo Whiskey [About] and the Nikka Taketsuru 12 yo Whiskey [About]. Some of you may have sampled the Hakushu, donated by Carl Bergeron, at the auction. The Nikka Taketsuru is a new whiskey to America and it's only been available in America for several months.
- Murch Whiskey Club Staff
Excerpt From:
Continuing on with Cherry Blossom season we thought we would direct your attention to a fascinating NPR story about Japan's obsession with American nostalgia. The piece, which aired last night, described how a Japanese bar owner has accumulated perhaps the most expansive collections of centuries-old whiskeys in the world. You can listen to the story here and we have pasted an excerpt of the text below. The Smithsonian Magazine ran a longer piece about Rogin's Tavern [here]. The author's Flickr photostream is here. Perhaps the next Murch Whiskey Club outing can be to Rogin's Tavern, just outside of Osaka.
- Murch Whiskey Club Staff
Excerpt From:
Japan's obsession with centuries-old bourbon says a lot about the country's culture
There's the story of his visit to a small little town called Moriguchi where Rogin's Tavern is. The bar only serves centuries-old bourbon. Some bottles date back to the 1800s.
Downey tasted bourbon from 1904. He says the bar is a "time capsule of taste."
Seiichiro Tatsumi is the bartender at Rogin's Tavern.
Downey says, for 25 years, Tatsumi "had been driving the back roads of America, stopping in every liquor store he saw and buying up old bottles nobody else wanted because he saw the promise and possibility of old bourbon."
Click here for the full story.
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