MARYLAND HERITAGE SHERBROOK RYE
2022 releaseMASH BILL – 95% rye, 5% malted barley
PROOF – 109.7
AGE – 14 years
DISTILLERY – MGP (bottled by Maryland Heritage)
PRICE – $290 (includes shipping)
WORTH BUYING? – No. But I’m glad to have it (something easier to say now long after having paid…)
Uncorked and tasted in The Year of No Buying (The what? 🔗 here.)
Around the same time Maryland Heritage released its initial series of well-aged MGP rye whiskeys—Sherbrook, Sherwood, and Mount Vernon—each sporting a facsimile of a discontinued pre-Prohibition label, another sourcing operation, Pablo Moix’s Rare Character, put out Fortuna. A key difference between the Maryland Heritage series and Fortuna was that the latter had been crafted using an actual vintage bottle of the original Fortuna brand whiskey, used by Pablo Moix as the measure by which he blended the Kentucky bourbon stocks he’d acquired. More than the bourbon’s original label, Moix wanted to recreate its original flavor profile. That’s what sold me on picking up Fortuna. A unique endeavor to summon the past, not just from history books but from actual history in a bottle!
Maryland Heritage, on the other hand, was only putting olde labels on contemporary MGP whiskey—an exceedingly common scenario. But at a ripe old age of 14 years, this was arguably uncommon MGP rye. And that is was sold me on Sherbrook, even though it cost three times the price of Fortuna. I did a lot of research into the Maryland Heritage series before I bit. By various accounts, the Sherbrook sounded like it would appeal to me most. I missed it on its first Seelbach’s release. A small number of bottles had been held back, and I managed to click fast enough the second time around.
And so here we are, about a year after purchase, two weeks after uncorking, and three pours into the bottle. These brief notes were taken using a traditional Glencairn.
COLOR – a rich and vibrant range of oranges that do autumn proud
NOSE – thick with bright rye spice, dry granite, finely ground black pepper, subtle caramel and milk chocolate wafting behind the earthier notes, a hint of cherry
TASTE – tangier and more syrupy than the dry nose would suggest, with ample rye spice and granite, now also vanilla, more caramel, and the cherry note now quite tart
FINISH – vanilla, caramel, rye spice, black pepper, subtler granite, tangy and tart cherry lingering in the sticky syrupy texture
OVERALL – a complex, mature bottle of classic MGP rye
This is an exceptional bottle of MGP’s famous 95/5 rye recipe, a widely sourced whiskey for good reason: It’s good, at any age.
And so it’s also quite familiar. My sense memory goes straight to a Hughes Belle of Bedford Rye I enjoyed in 2021, for example. That too featured a reprint of an old-timey label, to this day still my favorite such label.
While this Sherbrook from Maryland Heritage is notably more complex than the Hughes was, they share a solid and reassuring earthiness based in stone and dry rye spice notes. The Hughes was aged 8 years to this Sherbrook’s 14, and this naturally figures into the difference in complexity.
But I loved that Hughes rye. It was the kind of whiskey that transcends time. It took me back to an era I never lived through, yet one that lay in ruins all around me as I grew up in the historic mining town of Placerville, CA. In the late 1800s, Placerville was the “big city” in a rural region where the world rushed in, as historian J.S. Holliday put it, to make their fortune during the California Gold Rush.
Maryland Heritage’s Sherbrook Rye release similarly takes me back to the stone buildings, the overgrown dry fields with derelict barns and rusty farming equipment, the mining caves of Placerville—or “Olde Hangtown,” as it once was called, being the place where justice was meted out for Gold Rush era crimes and vengeances.
This rye is not a background whiskey. Even with its calming solidity it pokes at your attention. There is a slight edge around Sherbrook’s tanginess, a kind of saccharine bitterness, that lingers a bit more prominently than I would prefer. Still it’s a whiskey to be “appreciated” rather than mindlessly tossed back.
I just noticed I put “appreciated” in quotes. This reflects my mixed feelings about this rye. It’s good. No question. It’s too expensive. No question. And there is no question that other brands with very similar flavor profiles have been and will continue to be available. But by the time the people behind the Maryland Heritage Series were selling their initial trio of rye offerings as a set, in an overly fancy commemorative box, for $1200, I knew exactly who we were dealing with—producers of means with legitimately good taste who play on nostalgia and charge a premium for it. And: if they are truly enthusiasts of the Maryland rye tradition as they claim, why did they source a famously ubiquitous rye from Indiana, made from a mash bill of rye and malted barley, with no dash of corn to add sweetness in accordance with the Maryland Rye tradition?
Because marketing.
Now, honestly, I do not doubt this producer’s passion for whiskey in the slightest. Maryland Heritage is a sourced brand produced by Allview Liquors and Drug City Pharmacy and Liquors in Maryland, two relatively small businesses long known in that region for their good taste in picking whiskey single barrels. But the effort put into elevating these releases was side-eye-squint inducing for me, especially given the discrepancy between the Indiana rye whiskey in the bottle and the olde Maryland story affixed to it.
I love history. I love graphic design from past centuries. I love well-aged American rye and bourbon whiskeys when they turn out as complex as this Sherbrook homage has done. But I also love integrity. Don’t say you’re honoring Maryland style rye but sell me an Indiana whiskey. And the price here is pure silliness. I trust that the current evident leak in the overblown whiskey bubble will foul the industry’s deluge of nonsense and eventually render high quality, well-aged whiskeys like this one affordable again. This may still be some years off. But the rampant abundance of bundle “deals” that online and brick-and-mortar shops alike are currently pushing on consumers in order to move product is surely a sign that supply has now outpaced demand.
So as not to end on a note about money—bleck!—I’ll take my final sip of this glass:
Thick, syrupy, comfortingly spiced with rye and granite, that nice balance of vanilla-caramel and tart cherry. I’m going to enjoy this bottle through to its end, for sure.
Cheers!
The Right Spirit 