Like everyone else you’ve probably spent the last few months ensuring that your home bar-game was adequately up to scratch. After all, what else did we all have to do?
You’ve probably made an effort to stock all the right poisons – you have the hippest Tequila (sorry, which celebrity expression are we on now?), the peaty-est Scotch, the most herbaceous gin and the purest Vodka (it’s all about the Terroir, darling), but really where has that gotten you?
Sure it all looks super impressive and you can probably talk for hours about your choices but that’s a lot of bottles. Wouldn’t it be easier if you had one, just one bottle that could replace a lot of those spirits and still create amazing cocktail?
Well, this is where Starward Whisky’s Two Fold comes in. Made up of 60% wheat and 40% malted barley, Two Fold mainly gets its adaptable nature from the way that it is made.
“We use both a brewer’s yeast as well as distiller’s yeast,” explains Kotryna Gesait, the East Coast USA brand ambassador for Starward Whisky.
“Brewer’s yeast tends to create flavour esters that are more tropical,” she continued. “So we get a lot of banana, pineapple, and tropical, sort of bright and fresh fruits, all the way back from the brewing process. And that kind of comes through even much later on after it’s double pot distilled and matured”.
So what does that mean for your cocktails? Well, it’s these tropical esters that make Starward perfect as a rum replacement, as they blend beautifully in tropical drinks.
“To show this, for the video, we made a Tiki drink, the Hotel Nationale, which is fairly simple, with only four-ingredient,” continued Gesait. “The Starward stands up because of it’s kind of sweeter, more vanilla qualities. It’s a great rum replacement, and it’s easy.”
Gesait points out that it is also those buttery or sweeter vanilla notes mean that it has those flavours that can really appeal to a bourbon drinker’s palette, especially in a drink like a classic highball.
“It’s such a big, flavorful whiskey that it can work really well with Soda Water but it can also easily replace a gin if you want to mix it with Tonic Water. If you’re after a biota fall. Flavour then Ginger Ale can work well too.
The brand also uses red wine barrels, a combination of French and American Oak, to mature their whisky. “The barrels are untoasted, so they come to us straight from the winery and we wet fill them,” said Gesait, “this means that during the process of maturation, the spirit’s picking that these fresh, red wine, big fruity, yet sometimes peppery notes, that are very often found in Big Aussie Shirazes.”
Gesait points out that these red wine notes make the Whisky perfect for cocktails like a Manhattan that use Sweet Vermouth. “So any cocktail that uses Sweet Vermouth is just going to work really well because it’s got the strong, red fruit backbone. And in fact, The Manhattan is our founder’s favourite cocktail,” she continued.
“And so when he was creating whiskey, and envisioning whiskey, the idea was to create a liquid matured in red wine barrels, to ultimately make a great Manhattan. So that’s like, if you ever left him behind the bar, that’s the cocktail that he would make at the distillery in Australia. And the Starward stands up really well in Manhattan.”
So if you’re after the perfect, adaptable spirit to give as a gift to friends or even as a way to declutter your home bar, Starward may be your perfect solution.
For more info on Starward, go to starward.com.au
