Highlands Distilling War Horn Virginia Rye Whisky

ABC - $44.99 

TW - Not Available in MD

Class VI - Not Available

ABV - 45%

NAS

Highlands Distilling Company, Marion, VA

11 Aug 25

From the VA ABC website:  War Horn Virginia Rye Whisky - 90 proof. Rye, wheat and malted barley mash bill. Starts off with notes of spicy rye, softened with hints of wheat and barley.

Get a taste of the heritage where “The Scots and Irish plied their trade illegally, under the cover of night.”  Located way down in Marion, Virginia, I’d love to visit but it’s six hours away - Virginia is an enormous state!

This is an exceptional rye.  I’d say it’s a sippin’ rye and would be wasted in a cocktail.  And, unfortunately, Highlands Distilling doesn’t post cocktails on their website so I’ll have to find a good rye cocktail elsewhere.  

Not having a cocktail recipe got me wondering about the word, ‘cocktail’.  Seems like an odd word.  I was listening to a whiskey podcast recently and they mentioned that the word comes from the French egg cup, the coquetier.  Farmers used these cups to measure the eggs to determine if they were small, medium, or large.  Bartenders realized that the coquetier is the perfect size to measure liquor to mix it with other ingredients.  As more and more coquetiers were used, the word became Anglisized into ‘cocktail’.  That’s one theory.  There are a few others and our friends at Definitive Drinking Guide have a nice write-up about the cocktail origins.  

If you’re ever looking for a good cocktail recipe, our friends at Liquor.com are always there for you.  Considering that one of America’s first cocktails was the Sazerac and that was probably the first drink that bartenders made using a coquitier, I figured that the Sazerac would be our cocktail of the week.  They give us the recipe and some interesting history:

The earliest iteration of the cocktail is said to have originated from Antoine Amédée Peychaud, a pharmacist from Saint-Domingue, a French colony in what’s now modern-day Haiti. Peychaud relocated to New Orleans around the time of the Haitian Revolution, where he opened an apothecary that sold, among other things, his namesake Peychaud’s Bitters.

Interesting.  And they go into even greater detail.  War Horn Rye is delicious.  I encourage you to enjoy this Virginia classic.  Grazia!

Sazerac

Ingredients

• Absinthe, to rinse

• 1 sugar cube

• 1/2 teaspoon cold water

• 4 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

• 
  

  

  2 1/2 ounces rye whiskey

• Garnish: lemon peel

  
  

• Steps

• - Rinse a chilled rocks glass with absinthe, discarding any excess, and set aside.

• In a mixing glass, muddle the sugar cube, water and the Peychaud’s bitters.

• - Add the rye whiskey, fill the mixing glass with ice and stir 15­–20 seconds, until well-chilled.

• - Strain into the prepared glass.

• - Twist the lemon peel over the drink’s surface to express the peel’s oils, then garnish with the peel.