McMillans

This Whiskey was the first whiskey that I designed the recipe from start to finish. The Bonnie Star was an accidental hit, this one was intentional. I was given a request from one of the distillery partners to make a whiskey that he would like. I knew of a couple of his favorite bottles and started doing some research into what was publicly available on those. In the end I over complicated things by making it more of my own style.

I have settled on three distinctly separate whiskeys that are then blended together and aged as a final product. Each whiskey has had great attention to detail on the recipe and has gone through several variations to get it just right. I will admit to some Irish inspiration and the use of some peat smoked malts, everything else is completely original to the distillery.

This spirit was the hardest to name out of every variety we make. I remember a long group text message chat where several of the partners and I all went back and forth for several hours trying to find names for this one and a couple others. The others were named almost immediately but this one took a long time. We would throw out tons of names and every once in a while we would like one or two. A few hours later it would be eliminated for any number of reasons and we would go back to the drawing board. Finally the same partner who wanted a whiskey also threw out my last name as the name of the variety. I'm not a glory seeker or even the kind of person that wants his name known. I am happy to be behind the scenes doing my own thing knowing that people are enjoying my spirits. So he threw out McMillan's and set the scene for this whiskey as our high end, top shelf whiskey. Silver, Pewter, Crystal, and Spices. That’s what you see in a lot of our photography, that’s what we think of when we discuss the McMillan's. All of the pride, attention to detail, and soul searching that has gone into making this whiskey. There was too much effort and emotion placed into this to allow us to have fun with it like the rest. This one is meant to be placed prominently on display and enjoyed on those rare but great occasions.

We never even tried to add a Gnorm to this label; it designed itself almost immediately. It needed a clean, elegant, sophisticated label to go along with the image for this whiskey I had in my head when I made it as well as the photography that took so much time to meticulously adjust every detail. Most will never be seen by anyone outside of the owners but we took over 5000 photos all around the McMillan's whiskey, just to find a few to spread the word for us.

As described above this whiskey is not a trivial task to produce. This whiskey is a product of three separate whiskeys. I mash and ferment each separately. I double distill each variety before blending them, not equally (because that would have been too easy) before finally aging them in new oak 15 or 30 gallon barrels.