Chattanooga Whiskey is taking whiskey and cola back to its roots with an unusual approach: infusing a bourbon with a series of all-natural ingredients that historically were used to create soda-fountain colas centuries ago.
Unlike some of Chattanooga’s other experimental releases, which use the distillery’s flagship high-malt “Barrel 91” bourbon recipe, this one starts off with a blend of four bourbon mashbills. The mashbill has a strong component of malted grains, with the recipe including eight types—pale malted rye, floor-malted barley, pale malted wheat, honey malted barley, caramel malted barley, Munich malted rye, caramel malted wheat, and pale malted barley—alongside unmalted yellow corn. The whiskeys were blended together for this release.
After assembling the blend, distiller Grant McCracken infused it with a mix of 10 botanicals, specifically targeting ingredients that were commonly used to make cola back in the 19th and 20th centuries. The list includes kola nuts (a type of nut with high caffeine content from the African rainforests, which is where the name “cola” came from), citrus peel, dried cherries, sarsaparilla, vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, mace, cardamom, and marshmallow root (a type of plant historically used to cure sore throats. After infusing the bourbon for a week using nearly 200 pounds of these botanicals, McCracken sweetened the whiskey with cane sugar and cut the final product to 45% ABV…