All Hail Sap Lord

Whisky Release Day: Saturday, March 30 @ 12:00 PM

Spring in Canada ushers in some long-awaited sunshine and warm weather, melting winter’s white remnants along the way. The rising temperatures have another benefit, though. They help release sugar reserves in maple trees that were built up the previous summer. If you tap a tree during this time of year, you can collect this sugary sap and boil or reduce it down into the Canadian staple, maple syrup. Fun fact: Canada produced almost 324 MILLION litres, nearly 12 times the volume of the next largest national producer (the US).

Being as quintessentially Canadian as it is, we started to explore how we could marry this liquid gold with another delicious liquid we produce that also possesses a strong Canadian heritage: whisky. While there have been plenty of maple whiskies and maple whisky liqueurs done before, most contained maple flavouring, and none utilized the sap that maple syrup is actually derived from. SAP LORD began to emerge.

We started by reaching out to our good friends at Florio Sugar Bush to get our hands on some bulk Ontario Grade A Dark maple syrup from 2023. We emptied some whisky casks and refilled the still-wet whisky casks with the maple sticky stuff. After months of aging, we emptied those casks (more to come on this), blending whiskies of our 4R mashbill and laying them to rest in those maple syrup casks. They were then dumped, and a small amount of sap water from Florio Sugar Bush was added to help proof the whisky to its 47.4% sweet spot. THIS IS NOT A MAPLE WHISKY. This is a whisky with maple notes and maple influence that are naturally imparted and balanced.

The bottles will be available online and on-farm beginning this Saturday, March 30th at 12 PM and will retail for $92.92 + HST. Bottles will be limited to 2 per customer in hopes that as many folks as possible can get a taste, considering we only have 380 in total. See you Saturday!