Butterscotch | Summer fruits | Apricot | Orange rind

Apricot | Summer fruits | Peach preserves | Orange marmalade | Peppery rye spice | Graham cracker | Pie crust | Light flavors for the proof

Creamy rye spice | Summer fruits | Slight spice | Light on the backend

Located in Nashville, Indiana, Hard Truth Distilling Co. offers a broad range of spirits from rum to high-aged sourced bourbon to in-house distilled whiskeys. Malted Rye Sweet Mash Rye Batch 001 is a 10 barrel batch that was distilled from 54% rye and 46% malted rye, making it a 100% rye mashbill. Malting rye is much less common than malting barley, and aids in the distillation of a 100% rye mashbill.

The Hard Truth Master Distiller’s Reserve Collection is the first set of limited edition whiskeys released by the company, which was released in late 2022 and also included Chocolate Malt Sweet Mash Rye Whiskey (RW-3) and Caramel Malt Sweet Mash Rye (RW-4). While Chocolate Malt and Caramel Malt each leaned heavily into their target flavor profiles, Malted Rye is less specific in its delivery. Predominantly dancing between summer fruits and varying spice flavors, Malted Rye is good, but doesn’t quite reach the same height or deliver the unique flavors found in the other whiskeys in this limited edition collection. Most notably, it drinks lower than its proof, which makes for a very approachable sipper but also one that feels like it has more intensity of flavor to give.