On a Thursday morning in early June, Jay Erisman pointed to a lime-green Jeep sitting in the car park outside New Riff Distilling.
“That car is sitting right on top of the well,” he said as he stood in the glass-walled still tower that houses a 60ft, 19-plate (plus three spirit plates at the top) column still. The structure looks out over the lot and a strip of highway in Newport, Kentucky, just outside Covington, which sits on the Ohio River across from Cincinnati. The water source, Erisman continued, is one of several things that make New Riff stand out from the growing number of distilleries in this state, home to the oldest, most iconic bourbon makers. (See: Jim Beam, Buffalo Trace, Maker’s Mark, Woodford Reserve, Wild Turkey, and so on.)
The distillery was co-founded in 2014 by Erisman and Ken Lewis, the recently retired owner of Party Source, one of the largest liquor stores in the US (it’s located across the car park from New Riff). Erisman and Lewis got to know each other over the years Erisman spent working as the store’s fine spirits manager. In the mid-aughts, as bourbon rose from the stuff your dad drinks to belle of the liquor industry ball, brawny ‘high-rye’ bourbons in particular, such as Four Roses, grew in popularity.
“We loved the flavour ourselves, but also watched as the palates of bourbon lovers evolved to include it as well. It became a ticket to the sort of powerfully flavoured bourbon we wanted to make,” he said.
An obsession with those intense, complex whiskeys has guided him and New Riff’s head distiller, Brian Sprance, a veteran brewer and alum of Sam Adams, to continually produce something slightly atypical.
From the very beginning, New Riff flouted industry norms. When it started production in June 2014, the team knew they wanted to make exclusively sour mash products. Having never distilled before, there wasn’t any stillage to make the sour mash, so they distilled corn whiskey — which Erisman calls a “sacrificial” batch — only to make stillage to start the sour mash bourbon.
There is also an unconventional water source that is backed by an interesting story.
“When we started, we wanted to find a better, more interesting source of water than municipality water,” he said. Kentucky’s famous distilleries run on city water and while few can contest that those iconic facilities make great bourbon, there is a way to make spirit even more distinctive. Erisman examined local groundwater maps and discovered an aquifer on site. He consulted with hydrologists from the University of Kentucky who confirmed that it would be excellent whisky-making water. Now the private well under the parking lot provides water that is rich with limestone, making it very hard.
“It’s superb for making bourbon. It’s very classic Kentucky water. We’re one of the few sour mash whiskey makers in Kentucky that runs on traditional groundwater. The character of our whiskey begins on that water,” said Erisman, noting that New Riff is borrowing a page from what Scotch distillers have done throughout history. From distinctive water sources come distinctive whiskies.
This has benefits, but also drawbacks. Groundwater is geothermically cold and remains at 14ºC every day of the year. Not having to chill the water saves the distillery a lot of energy. (They still have a chiller, but it is the size of a freezer chest, not a hulking cooling tower.) However, the well’s supply maxes out at 500 gallons (1,893 litres) per minute, so if the size of the distillery is increased, it has to be within the confines of that limit. As such the growth over the past 10 years has mainly revolved around the fermenters. After opening with four fermenters in spring 2014, a fifth and sixth were added a year later. In 2022, three more were installed for a total of nine, which allows the distillery to produce about 12,000 barrels of spirit each year.
But when Erisman is talking about production, few things get him as lively as the stills. New Riff has a beer still, which is an impressive 24 inches (61cm) in diameter, a 375-gallon (1,420-litre) doubler, and a 500-gallon (1,893-litre) pot still used for gin production, made entirely of copper. This is another feature that makes the distillery different from the rest, as most distilleries have stainless steel beer stills. The beer heater, condenser, lyne arm, reflux line — all copper.
“When we were designing the distillery, we didn’t know what would be ‘adequate’ copper contact, so we built whole thing in copper. It’s a 100 per cent copper distillation path, every moment,” he explained. “We want the beer to interact with copper ions. In a vapour state, we want that to interact with copper.”
As such, while many distilleries do their experimental products on a pot still, the New Riff team does its most enterprising work — such as its peated bourbon and chocolate oatmeal stout bourbon — on the column still. This measure yields whiskey that Erisman calls “more provocative”.
The barrelling room has a 750-gallon (2,839-litre) capacity, which is large enough to hold the output of one fermenter. The distilling team cut the new make to 110 proof (55% ABV) before it goes into barrel.
“We don’t homogenise a batch of whiskey. Most distilleries distil the liquid from one fermenter, then it goes into a tank, then next one goes into a tank. They mix it all and then cut it. We don’t,” Erisman explained, noting that New Riff’s tanks aren’t big enough to homogenise batches. “We capture the character of each fermentation. We taste it four years later. Sometimes one is sweet, one is dry, one is spicy or smoky.”
Now, some of those provocative whiskeys are rolling out to mark New Riff’s landmark 10th anniversary. The distillery’s incredible growth has made it one of the 15 largest distilleries in Kentucky, earning it Heritage membership status in the Kentucky Distillers’ Association.
“At 10 years, New Riff is starting to become mature,” said Erisman. “We sought to do things correctly from the beginning. We’ve been holding back some whiskey and now aged releases are starting to come to fruition.”
In June, the team debuted an eight-year-old rye. But that’s not to say other provocative products haven’t been unveiled over the years. Last fall, they released a sour mash single malt and another release is scheduled for this fall. An experimental undertaking involving various barley strains, it is the outcome of what Erisman deems an “epic journey” that started when the distillery opened in 2014.
“It’s a very intense, deep project. The level of complexity of a Kentucky single malt made in a Kentucky style was heavily informed by style and beer recipes and mash bills. It’s an investigation and interpretation of traditions by our people,” he said.
“From top to bottom, it’s an example of barley malt that was never attempted before in Kentucky.”
Beyond playing around with barley, New Riff has remained laser-focused on rye. The core straight bourbon whiskey is bottled in bond and made with 30 per cent rye. The rye whiskey in the core range is also bottled in bond, comprising 95 per cent rye and 5 per cent malted rye. New Riff mashes about 25 per cent more rye than corn, which makes it very unique among Kentucky operations. In addition to the bottled-in-bond bourbon and rye, the core range includes Single Barrel Bourbon and Rye and a six-year-old Malted Rye. There’s also Kentucky Wild Gin Bourbon Barreled.
Distinctive as each product is from the next, they all share one quality: they are non-chill filtered, a feature that Erisman is so devoted to that he refers to it as a “religion”. It can be traced back to his love of Scotch whisky, and he calls out Springbank, in Campbeltown, as a standard bearer when it comes to non-chill-filtered products.
“It was dramatic to me as a whisky taster. I was fascinated with chill filtration from earliest days of drinking whisky in my dorm room,” he said. “I was getting flavours that later, as I learned more, I could connect and know that I was tasting things filtered at one extent or another.”
Non-chill-filtered Scotches became an integral part of the inventory as he grew Party Source’s selection from 65 to 315 facings of single malts — yet another example of how New Riff draws on its fascination with history and spins a ‘new riff’ for the modern world.
