Angel’s Envy: a hidden gem

This is the story of how a legendary whiskey maker came out of retirement to pioneer cask-finished bourbon with his son and, in the process, created one of the standout brands of the last decade: Angel’s Envy.

Angels Envy: Family values and the value of family

If you’re not familiar with Lincoln Henderson, you’ve certainly tasted his whiskey. An inaugural member of the Bourbon Hall of Fame, for nearly 40 years he was master distiller for Brown-Forman, helping to develop brands like Woodford Reserve, Gentleman Jack, and Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel.

After retiring in 2004, nobody would have begrudged him if he just put his feet up and enjoyed his secured legacy. He could have used his knowledge, experience, and connections to phone it in and make a quick buck bottling a bog-standard whiskey called something like Lincoln’s Legacy or Reserve.

Instead, he decided to create something original with his son. Wes Henderson felt they could explore their shared interest in cask-finishing together in a new independent brand.

The method of transferring already mature whiskey into a different style of cask to bring alternate flavours to the spirit is commonplace in Scotch and Irish whiskey. In the recent bourbon boom, plenty of new distilleries have used the technique too.

But this was 2006 when the American whiskey landscape was very different and there simply wasn’t a distiller creating a continuous supply of barrel-finished bourbon.

Lincoln and Wes set about sourcing whiskey and experimenting with different fortified wine finishes. They finally decided on ruby Port for their signature expression and in 2010 the father-son project launched Angel’s Envy, a name that references the angel’s share. Sadly, Lincoln died in 2013, just two months after the brand broke ground on its distillery.

How Angel’s Envy whiskey is made

There’s a seven-step process to make Angel’s Envy whiskey. It all starts with a mash bill of 72% corn, 18% rye, and 10% malted barley (the same as Woodford Reserve: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it). This is milled and cooked with water and setback (water and grain fines from the previous day’s distillation run). The mash is then cooled and yeast is added to ferment for 65-70 hours, with chilled water running through coils inside the fermenter to control temperature.

The distiller’s beer that comes out of the fermenter at 10% ABV is then pumped through a 35ft continuous column still where it’s distilled to 64%, before being redistilled in a pot still doubler to concentrate the ABV up to 69%. This gives you Angel’s Envy new make spirit, which is diluted with water purified with reverse osmosis to 62.4% and popped into 200-litre toasted and new charred oak barrels. Around 100 are filled per day at the distillery, which is then sent to the brand’s warehouses to age anywhere from four to ten years.

Then comes the really fun part: finishing. After the initial blending, the bourbon is popped into 225-litre French oak ruby Port wine casks, sourced through a broker in Portugal, for an additional three to six months. There’s no exact set time for this final finishing process, it’s only Angel’s Envy when the blenders say it is. The casks are then emptied and the whiskey is blended in small batches (about eight to 12 barrels) one last time to ensure a consistent flavour profile is met before it’s diluted to the brand’s bottling strength of 43.3% ABV.

A lot to toast to at Angel’s Envy Distillery

That creation has led to widespread acclaim (and plenty of shiny awards), and it was presumably that and the Henderson legacy that convinced Bacardi to acquire Angel’s Envy in 2015. A year and a half later, it opened a $27 million distillery, the first and only full-production whiskey distillery in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. This is a properly modern distillery with all the trimmings. It’s on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and has a retail area, five tasting rooms housing educational bourbon tastings, a ‘bottle your own’ experience room, bar spaces where an on-site team creates cocktails for guests, and event space with a fully-catered kitchen.

There’s also the Angel’s Envy Meta Distillery, a virtual reality distillery that invites guests on educational production tours, bourbon-making experiences, interactive cocktail challenges, and to plant virtual white oak trees around the distillery, linking to the brand’s Toast the Trees initiative. Yes, that word sustainability hasn’t been forgotten by Angel’s Envy, which has concentrated its efforts on raising awareness of the increased need for a healthy and secure white oak tree population.

Don’t forget that bourbon must legally be aged in new oak barrels, and the white oak tree is the most common type of wood used. Each white oak tree yields between one and three barrels and takes about 70 years to mature. Angel’s Envy has planted over 200,000 trees since the program’s inception and plans to increase the percentage of tree plantings that will specifically support a sustainable barrel production cycle.

Tasting Angel’s Envy

Finishing is at the heart of Angel’s Envy, and the team is constantly exploring new ways to innovate and push boundaries. It’s not an easy balancing act. So far, however, the brand has landed on the side of the angels. It’s very popular, the price is reasonable, the branding is distinctive, and it’s a dram that has changed the landscape around it. I would like to see the wider range become more easily accessible and you would think Bacardi could assist with that.

For all the ground-breaking process and family tradition, however, what I like most about Angel’s Envy is simply how it tastes. It’s got all the hallmarks of a whiskey made by somebody with vast experience, as a young distiller could have fallen into the trap of over-seasoning the spirit with Port-barrel influence.

Instead, this is a comfortable, lazy Sunday evening of a dram. The aromas are rich and inviting, with notes like cherry, orange peel, cinnamon, chocolate, damson, butterscotch, tomato stem, vanilla, and Port-soaked oak. The texture is soft and supple, a true Kentucky hug, and carries more dried fruit, dark chocolate, and creamy vanilla, but this time with more earthy spice (like chilli pepper), grape tannins, oaky warmth, and red berry sweetness. Throughout there are hints of aromatic herbs (I get tarragon mostly).

This is unmistakably a bourbon, just with a graceful finish of Port influence. I think it’s a lovely sip, and I don’t blame the angels for wanting more of it.

Angel’s Envy is available from Master of Malt here.

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