Years of research and a dedicated group of historians have helped to lead us to a true field-to-glass whiskey made from rare, historically important heirloom-corn varieties. We released our first one in 2016—using Hickory Cane dent corn—and we’ve continued to release a different one each year. In the years to come, we intend to find our favorites and help reclaim biodiversity in distilling.
Why Heirloom Corn?
If you want to know what whiskey tasted like before Prohibition, you also have to talk about the corn that was grown back then—and by talk about it, I mean learn every intimate detail about corn. We did that, and we are proud to be part of a small group of distillers using heirloom corn, and thus part of a wider movement to reintroduce biodiversity to distilling.
The open-pollinated corn varieties that our ancestors used to make whiskey are disappearing—and when they’re gone, they’ll be gone forever. At Pinckney Bend, we produce “field-to-glass” whiskey using rare, hard-to-find heirloom varieties of corn. The varieties we select were once associated, historically, with making whiskey. To the degree possible, we also choose types that were grown in our region before the introduction of hybrids in the 1930s.