Most American whiskey makers face a seemingly inevitable fork in the road: One path is marked “bourbon,” and the other is marked “rye.” And if your mash bill doesn’t fit neatly into the federally regulated definitions of either — at least 51 percent corn in the case of bourbon, or else a minimum of 51 percent rye — then tough luck.
It’s enough to keep most producers on the straight and narrow, but now and then comes a maker willing to go off-road if that means making a better whiskey. Wyoming Whiskey is one such maker, and Outryder is one such whiskey.
Wyoming Whiskey’s Roots
But before we get too deep into the weeds (or, to use a more Cowboy State-appropriate metaphor, sagebrush), let’s back up to the beginnings of Wyoming Whiskey itself. The operation was established in Kirby, Wyo., in 2006, with a conviction to distill its spirits using non-GMO, Wyoming-grown grain and a local water source. On July 4, 2009, the nascent business began distilling what was intended to be its flagship product — wheated bourbon.
That bourbon hit store shelves in 2012, and more than 10 years later, wheated bourbons remain the core of the Wyoming Whiskey range. But along the way, co-founder David DeFazio got the itch to make a rye — a notion he had to sell to its original master distiller Steve Nally, a living legend in the world of bourbon but a confirmed rye skeptic.
In the last months of 2011, Nally reluctantly distilled 100 barrels of rye plus another 200 barrels of high-rye bourbon. Three years later, after Nally had moved on, DeFazio asked Wyoming Whiskey master blender Nancy Fraley to sample both.
“Nancy called me the next day and said, ‘You’re not going to believe it — this is some of the best young rye I’ve ever tried,” DeFazio says.
‘Stretching the Soup’
The team then allowed both whiskeys to mature to year four, after which Fraley deemed the rye ready and the bourbon “really close.” Once the decision was made to debut both as 5-year-olds, DeFazio asked Fraley about the rye’s mash bill and received an unexpected answer.
“She said, ‘You’re not going to believe it: it’s only 48 percent rye.’ And I said, ‘Do the math again.’ ‘She goes, ‘I’ve done it six times,’ and I’m like, ‘Holy s*** — we don’t have a rye.”
With no appetite to misrepresent its product or mislead the consumer, the team regrouped and decided they’d embrace the admittedly “unsexy” category of straight American whiskey — an umbrella term encompassing any spirit distilled from fermented cereal grain and aged in new oak for at least two years. But within that broad definition was the creative license to bring a different kind of American whiskey to market, one whose makeup wasn’t determined by an industry regulation but rather what made for the best experience on the palate.
“Why don’t we just use [what] we were given, blend the bourbon with the almost rye, and create that as the product?” DeFazio recalls of the group consensus. “We’ll stretch the soup, so to speak.”
An Uncategorical Whiskey
And with that, Outryder was born. Named after the solitary cattle-herding riders positioned at a herd’s flank, the none-of-the-above whiskey was released in 2016. The inaugural 66-barrel batch blended roughly two parts of Nally’s high-rye bourbon with one part of the “almost rye.”
Naturally, DeFazio followed up with Nally to try and figure out why said “rye” was distilled under its legal definition — and received a pithy answer.
“I called Steve and asked him, ‘Hey man, I want you to know that this whiskey you made is spectacular … but why’d you only use 48 percent rye?’ And he said, ‘Because I told you, I didn’t want to make rye.’”
It Just Feels Right
What Nally did make — Outryder — is what DeFazio describes as “the perfect bridge between the two. It has the front-of-mouth spice, not heavy at all, but it doesn’t have that super-high-rye sizzle that you get out of a 60, 70, or 80 percent rye. It has just enough of that spice on the palate, but it has a finish like a bourbon.”
Another way Outryder defied the status quo was in its labeling, updated annually to reflect the change in the blending ratio — and flavor profile — that occurred with each year’s batch. “We’re not trying to be consistent with Outryder,” De Fazio says. “Each year is going to be a little different. That’s the fun part about it.”
By 2017, Wyoming Whiskey had begun distilling a “true” rye, made with the officially sanctioned 51 percent ratio of rye grain, to replace the dwindling stocks of Nally’s 2011 rye. But while this newer rye could be sold separately, “the goal was to allow us the flexibility to release a rye if we ever chose to,” DeFazio says — its primary purpose was to be blended into future editions of Outryder. It’s a destiny that was first fulfilled with the expression’s 2022 installment, which mingled the 4- and 10-year-old stocks of the rye whiskey and high-rye bourbon blends, respectively (since that release, the 2011 stocks have been exhausted; all current and future editions of Outryder are made with the rye and bourbon distilled in 2017 and onward).
DeFazio similarly has no compunctions over how it should be enjoyed, freely volunteering that he’s known to plunk two ice cubes into a neat pour to bring its bottled 100-proof down to a gentler 90, “allowing some of those more subtle flavors to open up and present themselves.”
However, this is not DeFazio’s favorite way to enjoy Outryder: that honorific belongs to a specific time and place.
“One of my favorite places to go in the world is a little bar in Dubois, Wyo.,” he says. “Whenever I’m stopping in there for a night or if I’m going to have dinner, I will order an Outryder neat and a beer. To me, that is just the perfect pairing. It feels very Western, but more than anything, it’s just what I gravitate toward. It just feels right.”
“It just feels right”— not a bad slogan for Outryder itself.
This article is sponsored by Wyoming Whiskey.
