Malt & Peat

Texas has no peat, at least not the kind found in the moors that blanket Scotland. The climate is simply too warm and too dry; peat needs millennia of damp cold to form. So anyone at Balcones in Waco wanting smoky whiskey has to find another way, since there's no bog outside the door.

For the unpeated Texas Single Malt "1," Balcones uses Golden Promise barley from Scotland, malted just like a classic Scotch. Alongside that, the distillery now also malts Texan barley itself, the first of its kind in the state. Both paths run through the same mash tun but yield whiskies with different weight and different sweetness.

Anyone at Balcones looking for smoky whisky will still find it: the "1" Peated Texas Single Malt. Here, malted barley already peated in Scotland is used, imported as a finished raw material. So the peat smoke itself stays Scottish; only the barrel and the surrounding climate are Texan.

The smoke turns truly Texan with Brimstone. For this corn whisky, the finished spirit is drawn afterward through the smoke of scrub oak, a low, tough oak that grows across the Texan hill country. Unlike Scottish peat smoke, which permeates the malt during kilning, this smoke is added only after distillation, straight into the finished whiskey.

This gives rise to two entirely different smoke notes within the same distillery: the imported, peaty one from Scotland, and the distillery's own woody one from the Texas Hill Country scrubland.