Orange zest | Malt-steeped tea | Toasted oak | Hint of stone fruit | Light cinnamon

Frosted Flakes cereal | Orange candy | Tobacco | Sandalwood | Approachable richness

Malt-steeped tea | Golden raisin | Cocoa | Raspberry jam

Copperworks American Single Malt Urban Family Barley Wine Cask is a special release available exclusively to Copperworks Distilling Co.’s Whiskey Club. This is a collaboration with Urban Family Brewing, a neighboring Seattle, Washington brewery. To create this release, Copperworks Distilling started with their flagship Five Malt recipe, which is 75% pale malt with the remaining 25% composed of four caramelized malts. They then finished it in barley wine casks from Urban Family Brewing for 10 months. Urban Family Barley Wine Cask is a single cask release totaling only 330 bottles.

Barley Wine is an ale, which is a “Malt beverage fermented at a comparatively high temperature containing 0.5% or more alcohol by volume possessing the characteristics generally attributed to and conforming to the trade understanding of ‘ale’” according to the TTB Class and Type Designation requirements. Barley wines are typically bottled with higher alcohol content ranging from 6-12% ABV or higher, which is more consistent with wine bottling proofs, rich body, and complex flavor profile. Unlike wine, however, barley wine is made from fermented grains as defined by the TTB.

While barley wine is commonly finished in ex-whiskey casks, finishing whiskey in ex-barley wine casks is far less common. The style has been explored by Sagamore Spirit, Virginia Distillery Co., and Balcones. Most notably, Copperworks Distilling Co. released Barleywine Cask American Single Malt in 2023, which was a single cask of their Five Malt whiskey aged for 7+ years, then finished in an Urban Family barley wine cask for 25 days.

For this latest release, Copperworks cuts the whiskey’s starting age by about half, but then finishes it in a barley wine cask for more than 10x the time of their previous release. The resulting flavor profile is surprisingly less barley wine forward than you might expect, instead maintaining a crisp American single malt base with added depth. The whiskey is still very much an American single malt in Copperworks’s style, though it has an approachable layer of added richness that seems largely attributable to the barley wine cask finish. Pinpointing flavor notes, the stone fruit, cinnamon, tobacco, golden raisin, cocoa, and raspberry jam lean into barley wine territory, but they are subtle, and the whiskey never comes across as “barley wine heavy.” This works in the whiskey’s favor to some degree, but it's also a bit of a disappointment, as I hoped for something more intensely barley wine focused. For a larger release with broader appeal, the flavor profile is right on, but that is not the case here. Instead, for a single barrel that feels intended to lean more heavily into its barley wine finish, despite being a solid all-around American single malt whiskey, it’s not as intensely unique as I hoped it would be.

The American single malt in review is bottle number 216 of 330.