Reminiscent of bottles made across the pond, these spirits are also distinctively American.

By Ruth Tobias, CSX Contributor

Though whiskey rookies tend to conflate them, single malt and Scotch are not one and the same thing. Not only do other types of whisky (to use the UK spelling) hail from Scotland, but the 100% malted barley-based, copper pot-distilled version for which it’s most renowned hails from other parts of the globe as well, including the United States.

Balcones 1 has a nice malty backbone. Photo credit Balcones Distillery.

Of course, this country is in turn most renowned for Bourbon, but the emergence of domestic single malts may owe as much to the micro brewing boom as the craft-spirits movement. As noted in our overview of the category, whiskey is essentially distilled beer—and most beer contains malted barley. So it’s “a natural step” from one to the other, says Winston Edwards, brand manager of Balcones Distilling in Waco, Texas. “After many years of drinking beer, especially beer we made, we found ourselves drinking a lot of malt whiskies. I guess there was a naïve, cocky moment when we said, "Hey, we can make this; we know the first part really well, and we can figure out the rest.” He describes their much-ballyhooed flagship, Balcones 1 Texas Single Malt Whisky, as “a cross between Bourbon and Scotch. You've got that delicate, malty backbone from old-school Scottish barley with hints of fruit” such as banana and pear, “paired with a bold oakiness” that comes from aging in charred new barrels, per American tradition (whereas Scotch typically matures in used casks).

Daric Schlesselman, head distiller at Brooklyn’s Van Brunt Stillhouse, also has a home-brewing background—and “in the spirit of American beer making,” he says, “we tend to innovate and change things up.” For instance, “I work with different barley strains from around the world; while standard distiller’s malt is dried just enough to arrest mold, I use a lot of roasted malts to get caramel, coffee, and chocolate flavors. If I were to use them for beer, it would be like porter or stout.” His Van Brunt Stillhouse Single Malt is thus “robust and intense, with hints of tobacco, clove, and fig and a long, lingering, roasty finish.”

Also out of New York is Hillrock Estate Distillery, a farm-to-bottle operation in the Hudson Valley that malts and kilns its own estate-grown grains for terroir-driven spirits such as the Hillrock Estate Single Malt Whisky. According to master distiller Dave Pickerell, founder Jeff Baker “agreed to let me distill anything I wanted so long as I produced one very smoky whiskey.” Redolent of clove and cinnamon, the result—made “the exact same way Scotch is made” but for the presence of new oak and absence of caramel coloring—strikes a balance between the “sweetness of the barley” and the “tobacco-y, peppery” character of the Speyside peat it’s smoked over.

Wasmund's Single Malt from Virginia is aged in used barrels with apple and oak chips. Photo credit Copper Fox Distillery.

At Copper Fox Distillery in Sperryville, Virginia, Rick Wasmund likewise malts his barley in-house; in fact, he was the first American to install a malting floor at his facility, and he’s the only one to use applewood and cherrywood in the process—a decision he made after asking himself, “Of all the good smokes out there, is peat really the only option?” Wasmund’s Single Malt Whisky is, well, singular in another way as well: it’s aged in used barrels with apple and oak chips for a “rich, complex layered effect” that’s “definitely not Scotch and definitely not Bourbon. It’s got its own consistent flavors on the front and back end.”

Speaking of apples, Harvest Spirits in Valatie, New York, is located amid the orchards of a third-generation apple farm, where head distiller Derek Grout began producing Harvest Spirits John Henry Single Malt a few years ago, following “a terrible harvest when we didn’t have enough apples to produce applejack through the winter. So we reached out to a brewer to make a malt wash for us and decided to do a Highlands-style whiskey.” Because it’s distilled in the same kettles and aged for two years (after resting in new oak) in the same large barrels as his applejack, says Grout, “it’s not oaky; it starts kind of mild, like sourdough bread, then finishes with distant-campfire and dried-apple notes.”

Next time you think single malt, then, you may as well as think American as Scotch.

Ruth Tobias is a longtime food-and-beverage writer based in Denver, Colorado. To view more of her work, visit her at http://www.ruthtobias.com or on Twitter@Denveater.