Modern Ancient Blue Blend Whiskey

A Japanese-style blended whiskey made in California from heirloom blue corn — that's a sentence nobody was writing five years ago. Rob Easter, a former bartender turned heirloom grain obsessive, founded Modern Ancient in 2018 on the conviction that old corn varieties make more flavorful spirits than the modern high-starch stuff, and Blue Blend is his clearest argument: aged and unaged whiskeys from several distilleries, multiple mash bills, pot and column stills, and a range of cask types, all vatted together the way a great Japanese blender builds texture. The backbone is California-distilled spirit from Buttonwillow Blue corn and organic Arizona Mexican June white corn; because Easter ages almost everything in used casks (he's never thrown one out), he had to partner with a small Missouri distillery for a straight bourbon aged in new chinquapin oak, which also pushes the blend past the 20% straight-whiskey threshold that legally makes it a "blended whiskey." No new-oak sweetness, no chill filtration, usually bottled at or above 50% — the grain is allowed to do the talking. Each batch is blended with roughly 20% of the one before it, solera-style, so this is a whiskey that keeps getting more layered every time it comes around.