#a pair of adoptable character designs we sold <3 -

[karmacores]

angelic designs with @renarwic

[pinketine]

Kiki my darling dear can you please explain to me the premise of. Whatever the fruity men with wild ass names is because I am going insane /silly lighthearted.

The premise of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure?

Oh boy

The explanation is going under this cut because of how long winded this will be

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is an anime series focused on a family, and their bizarre adventures, shocker. There are 9 parts, each focusing on a different member of the family, all of whom can be referred to by the nickname of JoJo. Part 9, JoJolands, has very recently just released its first chapter.

JoJo is welll known for being over the top, especially in the anime with the constant colour palette changes, ridiculous character designs and poses. And yeah, it does end up being extremely gay. This is evident in the often homoerotic dynamics the JoJo has with their "JoBro"

There's also a LOT of musical references, especially with Part 4 onwards.

Parts 1-6 follow one universe, with part 6 being reset by its main villain, causing a new universe. CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, this new reset universe is not parts 7-9. They are 2 separate stories about two separate Joestar families. The first 6 parts are this:

Part 1, Phantom Blood, is Jonathan Joestar, a young man in early 1900s England, who is the adopted brother of Dio Brando. Dio is evil as shit as a child, seemingly mellows out, until the pair of them are both about 19 or so, when it's revealed that Dio is still a power and money hungry little shit. He turns into a vampire and the part then becomes about killing him.

Part 2, Battle Tendency, is Joseph Joestar, Jonathan's 19 year old Looney Toon character (not even a joke, he deadass quotes Looney Toons) grandson, and starts in 1940s America before moving to Italy. He and his friend/JoBro Caesar Zeppeli are tasked with having to fight ancient Aztec Gods, the Pillar Men (yes, really).

Part 3, Stardust Crusaders, is Jotaro Kujo, Joseph's 17 year old deliquent grandson, as he, Joseph, Noriaki Kakyoin (the JoBro!), Jean Pierre Polnareff and Muhammed Avdol go on a 50 day cross contiental trip to Egypt to fight Dio in the late 80s. Yes, the same Dio. He's a vampire, ya know?

Part 4, Diamond is Unbreakable, is Josuke Higashikata (the kanji for the suke in his name can also be read as jo), Joseph's illegtimate 16 year old son in the summer of 1999 in Japan. He and his friends track down their local town serial killer, Yoshikage Kira, 33 years old, lives in the North East section where all the villas are-

Part 5, Vento Aureo, is Giorno Giovanna (Yes it's pronounced JoJo), the illegtimate son of Dio and Jonathan Joestar (it's GENUINELY not what it sounds like.) in 2001 Italy. He and his band of friends all named after Italian foods go on an adventure to kill the leader of the Italian mafia, Diavolo/Doppio Vinegar, in order to stop drugs being sold to kids.

Part 6, Stone Ocean, is Jolyne Kujo, the 19 year old deliquent daughter of Jotaro, and takes place in 2011 Florida. She and her friends break out of prison, save Jotaro and stop Pucci, a priest and follower of Dio, YES THIS GUY AGAIN, from resetting the world.

Those are the first 6 parts, and the first 6 JoJos. We then leave this universe, and join a completely new one. Important side note: Stands are only introduce in Part 3, with Parts 1-2 having this type of magical breathing named Hamon!

Part 7, Steel Ball Run, is Johnny Joestar, who is this universe's Jonathan, in 1890s USA. In order to regain mobility, he partners up with JoBro Gyro Zeppeli in order to win the Steel Ball Run horse race to learn the Spin and collect the corpse parts of Jesus Christ. He ends up having to kill the US President, Funny Valentine.

Part 8, JoJolion, is Josuke Higashikata, nicknamed Gappy, who is clearly this universe's Josuke in 2011 Japan. I never read JoJolion, so I'm not too familiar with the plot, but I do know that Gappy is actually two men. Like. He's a Steven Universe fusion of Yoshikage Kira and Josefumi Kujo. I'm not shitting you.

And now, we have the newly released Part 9, JoJolion! This is 15 year old Jodio Joestar, and we don't know much of the plot yet due to us having only one chapter. He seems to be this universe's Giorno, but maybe not a son of Diego Brando was ran over by a train. Apparently, it's the story of how he got rich. Right now, he's a drug dealer who was born in New Jersey and now lives in Hawaii in the present day with his sister (IDON'TCAREWHATARAKISAYSSHEISATRANSWOMAN) Dragona Joestar and his mother.

Something interesting to note is that the 7-9 JoJos are very much unlike their counterparts. Jonathan is a gentlemen, Johnny is a pretty selfish cold blooded killer. Josuke is a sweet kid, Gappy kills without remorse. Giorno resents drug dealers, Jodio is one.

So that's the premise for each part! I could go even more indepth, but I think this gets the point across. JoJo's premise is that it's a bunch of bizarre stories 2 families go through.

Anyways, part 3 is my favourite and my favourite character is Kakyoin ^-^ but my favourite JoJo is Johnny

[andilim4789]

Learn How to Play 토토사이트

The Tower of Voués was the keep of the castle built in 1305 by Count Henry I to protect the serfs' houses. It measures 11.70 m in the North by 14.70 m in the East and its height is approximately 30 m. It was sold in 1332 by Henry III to Adhémar de Monteil (Bishop of Metz) who built a castle around which Baccarat would be built. Let's be realistic -- casino gambling is best taken as a form of entertainment. The suburb of Buffalo's large Polish-American Catholic population is believed to be a factor for bingo's outsized popularity in Western New York, which has five times as many bingo halls per capita as the rest of the state. In spite of the fact that Flemish areas of Belgium do not use this design, preferring the Dutch national pattern (not yet dealt with by the galleries), it is interesting how other countries, either directly linked to French culture, such as Tunisia and Morocco, or with little or no connection to France, such as those in the south-east of Europe and in the Middle East (Turkey, Lebanon, Syria), have adopted the Belgian pattern, or a Belgian-derived one, as an alternative to the international one.

As a popular home game, it is played with slightly different rules. http://edition.cnn.com/search/?text=안전공원 The player who hits bingo after the desired ball count does not win the jackpot but does win a consolation prize. German decks also used different suits: Hearts, Bells, Leaves, and Acorns. An article on this topic by Scott McIntosh at Review Poker Rooms also explores this topic and comes to similar conclusions.he Millionaire Progressive.

Any hand consisting of a pair outscores a non-pair, regardless of the pip counts. (Pairs are often thought of as being worth 12 points each.) Caribbean Stud Poker will be played on a table having places for nine or less players. Contain the elements of the design set out in Diagram A and may or may not have printed on it the name and/or logo of the casino; Even with information on up to two of the dealer’s hole cards and an optimised strategy the player still has a substantial disadvantage (nearly 2%) so you need to have knowledge of at least 3 of the dealer’s hole cards before this is a worthwhile game. With perfect knowledge of all four dealer hole cards the strategy is trivial – Call, any winning hand or hand where the dealer will not qualify – though it may be worth playing some losing hands to avoid unusual/suspicious folding decisions where you hold a strong hand. With knowledge of only three hole cards or imperfect knowledge of four cards the strategy is more complex. A card came guide named Yezi Gex, attributed to a Tang female writer, has also been cited by some Chinese scholars of subsequent dynasties.

The dealer then gives five cards, face down, to all the players and gives himself four down and one up. You then look at your cards and decide to either play or fold. If you choose to fold, you lose your ante bet. If you choose to play, you place double the amount of your ante in the "bet" box. Texan Decks were first printed in 1889 by Russel, Morgan & Co. in Cincinnati. All the elements of the English standard are present including many of the features we take for granted today, such as round corners and diametrically set corner side indices. The pattern here strikes an elegant balance and an attractive array of English court cards. The brand went out of print for more than 80 years but was more recently revived by the United States Playing Card Co. Texan 1889's are now published on high quality linen embossed paper, slightly tinted to give them that 'antique' look. The deck slides and handles well and is held in respectable esteem by card enthusiasts and sleight of hand professionals. Latin suited cards are used in Italy. Spanish suited cards are used in peninsula.Oasis Poker is very popular in Nicaragua. It seems to have more placements than any other game. However, they call it Caribbean Stud Poker. The pay table is the standard one for the original hand.

Monte Carlo Casino has been depicted in many books, including Ben Mezrich's Busting Vegas, where a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students beat the casino out of nearly $1 million. This book is based on real people and events; however, many of those events are contested by main character Semyon Dukach.[18] Monte Carlo Casino has also been featured in multiple James Bond novels and films. The most notable method is known as the "station" system or method. However, if you are winning and the dealer is courteous and helpful, it's customary to tip.In 1999, 29% of players thought of themselves as having a gambling addiction to pachinko and needed treatment. Another 30% said they went over their budgets and borrowed amounts.

Armed with this knowledge, management may be more willing to increase prices. Craps players also often place bets for the dealers. It's because early 1880s-era slot machines would actually dispense fruit-flavored gum.The Crystal fountain roundabout between the Town Hall and St Rémy de Baccarat

Up to 15 players are randomly issued a number from 1 to 15 which corresponds with the top row of the bingo flashboard. Some older gambling guides tell of a cat-and-mouse game in which the blackjack player uses tips to get the dealer to deal another hand before shuffling when the cards remaining to be dealt are in the player's favor. The two and twelve are the hardest to roll since only one combination of dice is possible. 먹튀검증사이트목록 Outside bets will always lose when a single or double zero comes up. However, the house also has an edge on inside bets because the pay outs (including the original player's bet) are always set at 36 to 1 when you mathematically have a 1 out of 38 (1 out of 37 for French/European roulette) chance at winning a straight bet on a single number.

Blackjack is available to play for free at a number of online casinos. The red card in the red-numbered box corresponding to the red die, and the blue card in the blue-numbered box corresponding to the blue die are then turned over to form the roll on which bets are settled. Depending on the bet, the house advantage (“vigorish”) for roulette in American casinos varies from about 5.26 to 7.89 percent, and in European casinos it varies from 1.35 to 2.7 percent.Decision-making can be more difficult when you’re stressed or upset.

[michaelandy101-blog]

10 VR Marketing Examples to Inspire You in 2020

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/10-vr-marketing-examples-to-inspire-you-in-2020/

10 VR Marketing Examples to Inspire You in 2020

I won’t lecture you on the importance of incorporating virtual reality (VR) into your marketing strategy.

What I will do, however, is share a few fun facts about VR and show you nine examples of this technology used for marketing a product or a brand.

This year, the economic impact of virtual and augmented reality is predicted to reach $29.5 billion.

By the end of 2017, the number of shipped units of VR software and hardware from Sony, Oculus, HTC, and others totaled $2.4 million, up from $1.7 million in 2016.

By the end of 2020, the number of VR headsets sold is predicted to reach 82 million — a 1,507% increase from 2017 predicted totals.

VR is being adopted quickly, and adding it to your marketing channels is something you should definitely think about for the coming year.

What Is VR?

VR, short for virtual reality, is a form of interactive software that immerses users in a three-dimensional environment — usually by way of a headset with special lenses — to simulate a real experience. Ideally, VR allows people to simulate the experience in 360 degrees.

Numerous industries are now finding uses for VR in order to transport people to places they might otherwise have to travel to, or simply imagine. While movie companies, for example, are giving audiences the opportunity to experience the movie as if they’re a character in the scene, conventional businesses are now using VR to demonstrate and promote their products to potential customers.

Before we dive into some of the businesses that have found success injecting their marketing with a dose of VR, it’s worth noting that virtual reality has a few key differences from another term you might’ve heard before: augmented reality. Find out what these differences are in the video below.

Seeking inspiration for your own VR marketing campaign? Look no further. Below are nine of our favorite VR marketing campaigns and how they served the company’s marketing strategy.

Virtual Reality (VR) Marketing Examples

Wendy’s and VMLY&R: Keeping Fortnite Fresh

Key Technology: VERYX Food Sorting

Defy Ventures and Within: Step To The Line

Limbic Life: Project VITALICS

Lowe’s: Holoroom How To

Boursin: The Sensorium

Adidas: Delicatessen

Toms: Virtual Giving Trip

DP World: Caucedo Facilities Tour

TopShop: Catwalk VR Experience

1. Wendy’s and VMLY&R: Keeping Fortnite Fresh

While some brands were making full out VR experiences from scratch, Wendy’s identified how it could engage with gamers in Fortnite’s virtual world. Although this example is not technically a VR experience requiring a headset, the brand still leveraged a virtual world to market its product and tall a story.

In Wendy’s first ever Twitch stream, which won a Gold Clio, followed an avatar dressed as Wendy who appeared on the online battle game.

At one point in Fortnite’s online storyline, players were prompted to hunt cattle and transport beef to freezers at nearby restaurants. Once they did this, the players would earn coins.

When the Wendy’s team heard that Fortnite players were being encouraged to put beef in freezers, the chain tasked its marketing agency, VMLY&R, in creating an avatar that looked like Wendy. Wendy’s and its marketing firm then launched a Twitch stream where the avatar began to break into restaurants and destroy freezers:

    Like a commercial, native ad, or advergame, the goal of the campaign — aside from engaging new audiences — was to remind Twitch audiences that Wendy’s makes an effort to serve the freshest, best tasting beef to its customers.

During the stream, mentions of Wendy’s on social media went up by 119%. The stream was also viewed for a total of 1.52 million minutes with a quarter of a million viewers.

The campaign also allowed Wendy’s fans to interact with her avatar and the stream, which led other Fortnite players to start smashing freezers as well. Viewers of Wendy’s stream also began tweeting about it or posting in the feed’s comment thread. Because of engagement like this, it made Wendy’s company values, brand, and live stream incredibly memorable to gaming audiences.

Additionally, this campaign allowed the brand to engage and interact with gaming audience in a new and innovative way.

According to one Cannes Lions Jury Chair PJ Pereira, the creativeness of this campaign might have opened the door for new marketing opportunities in the future.

“[The campaign] was setting up a new trend instead of being the apex of a previous trend,” Pereira told Ad Age.

2. Key Technology: VERYX Food Sorting

Key Technology, a manufacturer and designer of food processing systems, created a Virtual Reality demo that would allow attendees of the Pack Expo food packaging trade show to experience a detailed, hands-on look at how the company’s VERYX digital food sorting platform works. It was part of a comprehensive B2B campaign to grow brand awareness among a target audience of food manufacturers, and VR gave participants a highly unique look at what exactly the process looks like inside of the machine.

While this 360-degree video doesn’t completely replicate the experience, it does indicate the differentiating way brands within such B2B industries as manufacturing can leverage VR to immersively demonstrate their sophisticated technologies and capabilities.

3. Defy Ventures and Within: Step To The Line

When my colleague attended Oculus Connect in October, the most memorable experience for her was, by far, the event’s VR For Good exhibit: a showcase of creative work that used Oculus and VR technology for social- and mission-focused ventures.

One such example of that work was Step To The Line: A short film (that was immersively viewed on a VR headset) documenting the lives of inmates at California maximum-security prisons. It was created by Within, a VR storytelling production company, in partnership with Defy Ventures, an entrepreneurship and development program for men, women, and youth who are currently or were formerly incarcerated.

With this unique watching experience, viewers were able to uniquely see what life is like within the walls of these correctional facilities, from the yard, to the cells, to the conversations that take place there.

4. Limbic Life: Project VITALICS

For far too many people, injuries, age, and disease can diminish mobility and equilibrium to the point where walking ranges from extremely painful to nearly impossible.

That’s why the folks at Limbic Life created the Limbic Chair, in partnership with the VITALICS research being conducted by RehaClinic. Pairing this special chair with a Gear VR headset allows users to more intuitively move their bodies (thanks to the chair’s combined neuroscience-based and ergonomic design) while virtually experiencing day-to-day experiences with a rehabilitative use of their hands and legs.

While the research is still underway and no definitive conclusions have been drawn, my coworker had the opportunity to use the chair at the 2017 Samsung Developer Conference and speak with the chair’s creator, Dr. Patrik Künzler.

“Patients enjoy being in the chair and the freedom of movement it allows. They enjoy VR a lot, especially the flying games,” he told Samsung Business Insights. And not only can the VR technology help them physically heal, but it also contributes to emotional rehabilitation.

“When they get up from the chair,” Künzler said, “they’re in a good mood and feel happy.”

Learn more about the conceptualization behind the Limbic Chair from Künzler’s TEDxZurich talk below.

5. Lowe’s: Holoroom How To

Anyone who’s gone through the existential angst of being a first-time buyer knows the unfathomable power of paperwork and finances to undermine the fun of designing or decorating a new home.

That is, until you walk into one of 19 Lowe’s stores that features the Holoroom How To VR experience.

Some homeowners are lucky enough to pay a professional to renovate their home when it needs to be. For others — Lowe’s core buyer — the next stop is the world of do-it-yourself (DIY) home improvement, which comes with its own hefty dose of stress.

That’s why Lowe’s decided to step in and help out homeowners — or recreational DIY enthusiasts — with a virtual skills-training clinic that uses HTC Vive headsets that guides participants through a visual, educational experience on the how-to of home improvement.

6. Boursin: The Sensorium

One of my colleagues recently pledged to give up dairy — okay, 48 hours ago — and she already claims to miss cheese, a lot.

You can imagine her happiness, then, when she discovered that the cheese brand Boursin once created a VR experience to take users on a multi-sensory journey through a refrigerator to shed light on its products’ flavor profiles, food pairings, and recipe ideas.

The goal: to raise awareness among U.K. consumers of Boursin’s distinct taste and product selection.

While the VR installment was part of a live experiential marketing campaign, the rest of us can get a taste — pun intended — of the virtual experience via this YouTube video.

7. Adidas: Delicatessen

In 2017, Adidas partnered with Somewhere Else, an emerging tech marketing agency, to follow the mountain-climbing journey of two extreme athletes sponsored by TERREX (a division of Adidas).

And what good is mountain climbing to an audience if you can’t give them a 360-degree view of the journey?

Viewers were able to follow the climbers, Ben Rueck and Delaney Miller, literally rock for rock and climb along with them. You heard that right — using a VR headset and holding two sensory remote controls in each hand, viewers could actually scale the mountain of Delicatessen right alongside Rueck and Miller.

This VR campaign, according to Somewhere Else, served to “find an unforgettable way to market TERREX, [Adidas’s] line of outdoor apparel & accessories.” What the company also did, however, was introduce viewers to an activity they might have never tried otherwise. Instill an interest in the experience first, and the product is suddenly more appealing to the user.

Check out the campaign’s trailer below.

8. Toms: Virtual Giving Trip

Toms, a popular shoe company, is well known for donating one pair of shoes to a child in need every time a customer buys their own pair. Well, this charitable developer found a new way to inspire its customers to give — wearing a VR headset.

The Toms Virtual Giving Trip is narrated by Blake Mycoskie, the founder and Chief Shoe Giver of Toms, and one of his colleagues.

As they describe the story of Toms’ founding, their VR experience takes viewers on a trip through Peru, where Blake and the shoe-giving team visit a school of children who are about to receive the shoes they need for the first time.

What Toms’ VR campaign does so well is something cause-driven organizations all over the world struggle to do: Show donors exactly where their money is going. Even without a VR headset, the video below gives you an experience that’s intimate enough to put Toms on your list for your next shoe purchase.

9. DP World: Caucedo Facilities Tour

DP World is a global trade company that helps businesses transport goods around the world. As the company opens new terminals, however, they need a way to show their customers what DP World’s property has to offer.

DP World’s recently opened Caucedo facility in the Dominican Republic is just one of several DP World properties that uses VR to promote its large and often mysterious ships and land masses as they suddenly appear in a community.

Is trade logistics a sexy industry? Not to everyone. But that’s exactly why a 360-degree tour of DP World’s terminal is so valuable here. Show people just how efficient, safe, and crucial these properties are to certain businesses — without making them put on a hardhat and walk through the port itself — and you can gain massive community support.

10. TopShop: Catwalk VR Experience

Just because you couldn’t attend TopShop’s fashion show during London’s Fashion Week doesn’t mean you couldn’t still “be there.”

TopShop, a women’s fashion retailer, partnered with Inition, an emerging tech agency, to give customers a “virtual” seat of their fashion show by wearing a VR headset connected to the event as it was happening.

The groundbreaking campaign put viewers right next to the fashion runway and the seats of the celebrities who were attending. Talk about making sure your brand is inclusive …

Check out the video below, recapping the experience.

Navigating VR in Marketing

As you read this, you might be thinking, “Why should a small-business marketer like myself be learning about high-priced VR campaigns?” 

Well, although VR might be too costly for many. marketing budgets, it’s getting more and more abundant in society, As it grows, we’re seeing a handful of brands leverage it for product promotion and virtual storytelling. And, while you might not be able to create a VR-based campaign, you can gather some great takeaways related to marketing innovation, content marketing, or visual storytelling which can give you other ideas of how to better interact with your digital audience.

Want to see how other emerging technologies will impact your marketing? Check out A Practical Approach to Emerging Tech for SMBs: AI, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, IoT, and AR/VR.

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[johnboothus]

The Next Wave of American Craft Whiskeys Is Here

American craft whiskey has come a long way in just two decades. The movement started with a handful of distillers who began fermenting in the mid-aughts and has now grown to over 570 small distilleries, according to Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute. Although there were a few small whiskey distilleries around the country that had gotten their starts in the 1990s, outfits like Old Potrero in California and Prichard’s in Tennessee, it’s the distilleries that rose up in that first decade of the new century — the modern pioneers of micro-distilling — that blazed the trail that so many have followed since. Those years saw the birth of a handful of startups in Colorado, New York, and Texas, some of which had to lobby their state governments to amend local law just to allow them to exist.

Yet it wasn’t long after craft whiskey started to gain momentum that some influential cognoscenti began turning their noses up at the spirits made by most small distillers, engendering a dismissive attitude that continues to stick a full decade later among a large slice of enthusiasts. Accompanying all that scoffing are a number of myths about how small distillers make whiskey, notions that were at best only half true in 2010 and are woefully out of date today. These attitudes remain frozen in the craft whiskey 1.0 era, labeling said whiskeys as underaged in small barrels with a flavor profile that is hot, woody, and cloying.

Yet how most small distillers around America make their whiskeys has evolved during the last decade and a half, as lessons were learned and operating scale grew. Early on, small whiskey makers embraced a spirit of innovation, some of them borrowing heavily from craft brewing along the way. Their successes even inspired the big distillers to come around to adopt certain craft-like practices, and now most of the big guys operate a micro-distillery of some description, capable of the small, craft-scale production runs favorable to experimentation (the best example is Buffalo Trace, which runs a separate, small distillery in the same complex as its industrial-scale setup). These trends came full circle when Nicole Austin, who began her distilling career with Kings County in Brooklyn,was named master distiller for George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey in 2018.

American Whiskey Grows Up

Balcones wasn’t the first distillery project to get started in Texas, but it was among the earliest, and its story is arguably the most iconic. Founders Chip Tate and Jared Himstedt famously did much of the construction and fabrication necessary to get the distillery built themselves, inside an old welding shop in Waco. The brand’s first whiskey, Baby Blue, was released in 2010 and was typical of its time in two ways: It innovated by making the first blue corn whiskey, imparting a richer and oilier flavor to the spirit; and used small barrels to reduce aging time down to several months. Baby Blue, although flavorful and unlike anything on store shelves at the time, illustrated both the pros and cons of craft whiskey 1.0.

Pressed by the need to get a whiskey on the market as soon as possible, many early small distillers like Balcones relied upon small barrels to age their whiskeys. Using these small barrels increased the ratio of wood surface area to liquid contained, thereby accelerating some (but not all) aspects of the maturation process. From the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, the term “small barrel” usually meant a cask holding anywhere from 3 to 10 gallons, as opposed to the familiar 53-gallon American Standard Barrel that is the bedrock of the whiskey industries in Kentucky and Tennessee.

In the years that followed, Balcones grew, gained renown, and sought investors. Those investors clashed with co-founder Tate, who sold his share and started a new distilling project. Balcones went on without him to open a new $14 million production facility using large copper pot stills, increasing production by a factor of 10. Yet even before the new facility came online, the company was already using larger barrels, and moving away from its start with tiny barrel aging.

Balcones isn’t alone among the modern pioneers of micro-distilling in making the switch to bigger barrels. Before there was Baby Blue, Tuthilltown’s Hudson Baby Bourbon was made using 3- and 14-gallon barrels, with aging periods ranging from six to 24 months. Tuthilltown now uses 15- and 26-gallon barrels for at least two years of aging, and 53-gallon barrels for at least four years of aging. Brooklyn’s Breuckelen Distilling relies on 25- and 53-gallon barrels. Also in Brooklyn, Kings County Distilling uses 15- and 53-gallon barrels, as does Philadelphia’s Mountain Laurel Spirits, makers of Dad’s Hat Rye. Nowadays 15- to 30-gallons barrels are the norm with small distillers, while 53-gallon American Standard Barrels and the even larger 59-gallon casks made by wine coopers are in more common usage than the tiny 3-gallon and 5-gallon casks that were prevalent in the early days.

The change in barrel stock underscores how whiskey made by small and medium-sized distillers has been gaining in maturity alongside the companies that make them. The malt whiskey made by Stranahan’s, another one of the earliest craft whiskey entrants, has been getting progressively older over the years. This has culminated most recently in the latest iteration of Stranahan’s Diamond Peak, which pairs four years of normal aging in new oak barrels with further aging in a solera system based on a trio of foeders (a type of large wooden cask).

The category-wide shift was driven by a problem inherent with using those tiny, new oak barrels that held less than 10 gallons. Namely, they came with a time limit for aging. Several months in these smaller vessels is ideal, maximizing extraction of color and flavor from the oak. However, using those barrels past a year risks drawing more flavor and tannin than is desirable. Whiskeys over-aged in new oak tend to become astringent and “woody.” In comparison, it could take 20 years for a whiskey to gain over-aged flavors in a 53-gallon barrel, while over-aging can happen in as little as 15 months in a 5-gallon barrel. By transitioning to a mix of larger barrel sizes, distillers were enabled to produce mature, aged whiskies that still retained an identity distinct from that of the big guys of the upper South, who rely entirely on the 53-gallon barrels and a traditional approach to maturation.

The Era of “Bottled In Bond”

The best statement on how craft whiskey has grown up over the last 15 years or so is found on the labels of a growing number of expressions that read “bottled in bond.” The term has been a statement of quality since the passage of the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897. Bonded whiskeys are made by a single distiller from stock made in a single distilling season, aged in a bonded warehouse for a minimum of four years, and bottled at 100 proof. Small distillers value one of those requirements in particular. “Producing a bottled-in-bond whiskey allows us to communicate to customers that Wigle produces whiskey that is older than four years,” says Alex Grelli, co-founder of Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh.

Although the small barrels used by many in the early days of craft whiskey could impart vanilla and tannic flavors, some parts of the maturation process demand time — the kind of time a small barrel doesn’t allow for. Over the years spent in the cask, some of the harsher chemicals in the spirit are extracted from the whiskey and into the wood, while others bond with each other and transform or otherwise break down. Young whiskey can be very flavorful, but a smooth and sophisticated character comes only with maturity.

However, few small or medium-sized distillers are able to lay up whiskey for years just to see how it will turn out, and only then develop special products. That’s a luxury for well-funded, large distilleries that can better afford to tie up capital in aging unproven whiskeys. So the introduction of these craft bonded whiskeys is no happy accident. An additional challenge? Smaller barrels have a greater evaporation rate (a.k.a. “the angel’s share”), so the relative loss from a 30-gallon barrel will be significantly higher than from a 53-gallon barrel. Putting out a craft bonded whiskey is the result of farsighted and deliberate planning, embracing the challenges and expenses, and making the changes necessary to accommodate older whiskeys. Some small distillers had the idea of creating a bonded whiskey from the start.

“We never set out to make a super-young whiskey,” says Al Laws, founder of Laws Whiskey House in Denver. “We wanted to be the first bonded four grain bourbon in the U.S. Our bonded whiskeys are true small batches. Not two barrels, but 10, 20, or 30, so we can reach those interested in the flavor experience.”

To meet that goal, Laws relied on 53-gallon barrels from the beginning, and Laws’ Bonded Four Grain Bourbon followed in due course, once the distillery had aged sufficient amounts of 4-year-old whiskey. Following that milestone, it steadily introduced 4-year-old, bonded versions of its other whiskeys. Then the age of those bonded whiskeys began to increase in 2019, with the release of a 6-year-old version of the Bonded Four Grain Bourbon.

For Wigle Distillery in Pittsburgh, moving toward the production of a bonded rye whiskey was practically an outgrowth of its identity, so it had it in mind early on. “We are named for a man, Philip Wigle, who started the Whiskey Rebellion when he punched a federal tax collector,” said Grelli. “The bottled in bond designation is inextricably linked to federal whiskey taxes, and so we knew we wanted to produce a product to celebrate this class of whiskey.”

The days when a typical craft whiskey came from tiny barrels are far behind us now, and the truth is small whiskey distilling in America transitioned to its 2.0 stage a few years ago. Most craft whiskeys are aged for longer periods, while the use of unorthodox grains has grown from blue corn and brewer’s malts to include red corn and exotics like spelt and millet. Although aging whiskey takes time, changing perceptions sometimes takes longer, but any of the expressions listed below ought to help with any lingering doubts.

6 Top Examples of American Whiskey’s Next Wave

Dad’s Hat Bottled in Bond Rye

Mountain Laurel Spirits is not just part of the gaining maturity of craft whiskey, but also a leader in the revival of Pennsylvania Rye. Dad’s Hat make a bold, spicy rye based on an 80 percent rye, 20 percent malted barley mash, which is a true throwback to pre-Prohibition whiskey.

Laws San Luis Valley 6-Year-Old Bonded Rye

Laws Whiskey House followed up raising the age of its bonded four-grain bourbon last year by doing the same with its rye this year. It’s just as novel, too, since extra-aged and bonded rye whiskeys aren’t exactly commonplace on the market.

Old Potrero Hotaling Single Malt

Old Potrero has remained small and has been around for a quarter-century now, which has given it plenty of time to produce some middle-aged and even truly old whiskeys. Those go into its occasional Hotaling releases, the most recent of which was an 11-year-old version of its 100 percent malted rye whiskey from 2017.

St. George’s Spirits Single Malt

Another example of craft whiskey before there was craft whiskey is California’s St. George’s Spirits, and the distillery has been releasing a new lot of its popular single malt for two decades now. Last year’s Lot 19 was made from stock aged in ex-bourbon barrels and sweet port and dessert wine casks for six to eight years.

Tom’s Foolery Bonded Bourbon

Traditional bourbon is made using mostly corn, usually making up about two-thirds to three-quarters of the mash. This Ohio farm distillery makes its bourbon with an exotic mash bill: 54 percent corn, 23 percent rye, and 23 percent malted barley. A recipe like that produces a spirit that draws less flavor from the sweet corn and more from the nutty, fruity barley, while retaining the spicy note found in most of the bourbon made across the Ohio River in Kentucky.

Woodinville Whiskey Company

Sometimes an extra-aged or bonded whiskey from a small distillery is a special one-time or periodic release, and not part of the brand’s regular line-up. Washington’s Woodinville Whiskey, however, has based its flagship bourbon and rye squarely on being at least 5 years old.

The article The Next Wave of American Craft Whiskeys Is Here appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/american-craft-whiskies-new-wave/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/the-next-wave-of-american-craft-whiskeys-is-here

[wineanddinosaur]

The Next Wave of American Craft Whiskeys Is Here

American craft whiskey has come a long way in just two decades. The movement started with a handful of distillers who began fermenting in the mid-aughts and has now grown to over 570 small distilleries, according to Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute. Although there were a few small whiskey distilleries around the country that had gotten their starts in the 1990s, outfits like Old Potrero in California and Prichard’s in Tennessee, it’s the distilleries that rose up in that first decade of the new century — the modern pioneers of micro-distilling — that blazed the trail that so many have followed since. Those years saw the birth of a handful of startups in Colorado, New York, and Texas, some of which had to lobby their state governments to amend local law just to allow them to exist.

Yet it wasn’t long after craft whiskey started to gain momentum that some influential cognoscenti began turning their noses up at the spirits made by most small distillers, engendering a dismissive attitude that continues to stick a full decade later among a large slice of enthusiasts. Accompanying all that scoffing are a number of myths about how small distillers make whiskey, notions that were at best only half true in 2010 and are woefully out of date today. These attitudes remain frozen in the craft whiskey 1.0 era, labeling said whiskeys as underaged in small barrels with a flavor profile that is hot, woody, and cloying.

Yet how most small distillers around America make their whiskeys has evolved during the last decade and a half, as lessons were learned and operating scale grew. Early on, small whiskey makers embraced a spirit of innovation, some of them borrowing heavily from craft brewing along the way. Their successes even inspired the big distillers to come around to adopt certain craft-like practices, and now most of the big guys operate a micro-distillery of some description, capable of the small, craft-scale production runs favorable to experimentation (the best example is Buffalo Trace, which runs a separate, small distillery in the same complex as its industrial-scale setup). These trends came full circle when Nicole Austin, who began her distilling career with Kings County in Brooklyn,was named master distiller for George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey in 2018.

American Whiskey Grows Up

Balcones wasn’t the first distillery project to get started in Texas, but it was among the earliest, and its story is arguably the most iconic. Founders Chip Tate and Jared Himstedt famously did much of the construction and fabrication necessary to get the distillery built themselves, inside an old welding shop in Waco. The brand’s first whiskey, Baby Blue, was released in 2010 and was typical of its time in two ways: It innovated by making the first blue corn whiskey, imparting a richer and oilier flavor to the spirit; and used small barrels to reduce aging time down to several months. Baby Blue, although flavorful and unlike anything on store shelves at the time, illustrated both the pros and cons of craft whiskey 1.0.

Pressed by the need to get a whiskey on the market as soon as possible, many early small distillers like Balcones relied upon small barrels to age their whiskeys. Using these small barrels increased the ratio of wood surface area to liquid contained, thereby accelerating some (but not all) aspects of the maturation process. From the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, the term “small barrel” usually meant a cask holding anywhere from 3 to 10 gallons, as opposed to the familiar 53-gallon American Standard Barrel that is the bedrock of the whiskey industries in Kentucky and Tennessee.

In the years that followed, Balcones grew, gained renown, and sought investors. Those investors clashed with co-founder Tate, who sold his share and started a new distilling project. Balcones went on without him to open a new $14 million production facility using large copper pot stills, increasing production by a factor of 10. Yet even before the new facility came online, the company was already using larger barrels, and moving away from its start with tiny barrel aging.

Balcones isn’t alone among the modern pioneers of micro-distilling in making the switch to bigger barrels. Before there was Baby Blue, Tuthilltown’s Hudson Baby Bourbon was made using 3- and 14-gallon barrels, with aging periods ranging from six to 24 months. Tuthilltown now uses 15- and 26-gallon barrels for at least two years of aging, and 53-gallon barrels for at least four years of aging. Brooklyn’s Breuckelen Distilling relies on 25- and 53-gallon barrels. Also in Brooklyn, Kings County Distilling uses 15- and 53-gallon barrels, as does Philadelphia’s Mountain Laurel Spirits, makers of Dad’s Hat Rye. Nowadays 15- to 30-gallons barrels are the norm with small distillers, while 53-gallon American Standard Barrels and the even larger 59-gallon casks made by wine coopers are in more common usage than the tiny 3-gallon and 5-gallon casks that were prevalent in the early days.

The change in barrel stock underscores how whiskey made by small and medium-sized distillers has been gaining in maturity alongside the companies that make them. The malt whiskey made by Stranahan’s, another one of the earliest craft whiskey entrants, has been getting progressively older over the years. This has culminated most recently in the latest iteration of Stranahan’s Diamond Peak, which pairs four years of normal aging in new oak barrels with further aging in a solera system based on a trio of foeders (a type of large wooden cask).

The category-wide shift was driven by a problem inherent with using those tiny, new oak barrels that held less than 10 gallons. Namely, they came with a time limit for aging. Several months in these smaller vessels is ideal, maximizing extraction of color and flavor from the oak. However, using those barrels past a year risks drawing more flavor and tannin than is desirable. Whiskeys over-aged in new oak tend to become astringent and “woody.” In comparison, it could take 20 years for a whiskey to gain over-aged flavors in a 53-gallon barrel, while over-aging can happen in as little as 15 months in a 5-gallon barrel. By transitioning to a mix of larger barrel sizes, distillers were enabled to produce mature, aged whiskies that still retained an identity distinct from that of the big guys of the upper South, who rely entirely on the 53-gallon barrels and a traditional approach to maturation.

The Era of “Bottled In Bond”

The best statement on how craft whiskey has grown up over the last 15 years or so is found on the labels of a growing number of expressions that read “bottled in bond.” The term has been a statement of quality since the passage of the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897. Bonded whiskeys are made by a single distiller from stock made in a single distilling season, aged in a bonded warehouse for a minimum of four years, and bottled at 100 proof. Small distillers value one of those requirements in particular. “Producing a bottled-in-bond whiskey allows us to communicate to customers that Wigle produces whiskey that is older than four years,” says Alex Grelli, co-founder of Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh.

Although the small barrels used by many in the early days of craft whiskey could impart vanilla and tannic flavors, some parts of the maturation process demand time — the kind of time a small barrel doesn’t allow for. Over the years spent in the cask, some of the harsher chemicals in the spirit are extracted from the whiskey and into the wood, while others bond with each other and transform or otherwise break down. Young whiskey can be very flavorful, but a smooth and sophisticated character comes only with maturity.

However, few small or medium-sized distillers are able to lay up whiskey for years just to see how it will turn out, and only then develop special products. That’s a luxury for well-funded, large distilleries that can better afford to tie up capital in aging unproven whiskeys. So the introduction of these craft bonded whiskeys is no happy accident. An additional challenge? Smaller barrels have a greater evaporation rate (a.k.a. “the angel’s share”), so the relative loss from a 30-gallon barrel will be significantly higher than from a 53-gallon barrel. Putting out a craft bonded whiskey is the result of farsighted and deliberate planning, embracing the challenges and expenses, and making the changes necessary to accommodate older whiskeys. Some small distillers had the idea of creating a bonded whiskey from the start.

“We never set out to make a super-young whiskey,” says Al Laws, founder of Laws Whiskey House in Denver. “We wanted to be the first bonded four grain bourbon in the U.S. Our bonded whiskeys are true small batches. Not two barrels, but 10, 20, or 30, so we can reach those interested in the flavor experience.”

To meet that goal, Laws relied on 53-gallon barrels from the beginning, and Laws�� Bonded Four Grain Bourbon followed in due course, once the distillery had aged sufficient amounts of 4-year-old whiskey. Following that milestone, it steadily introduced 4-year-old, bonded versions of its other whiskeys. Then the age of those bonded whiskeys began to increase in 2019, with the release of a 6-year-old version of the Bonded Four Grain Bourbon.

For Wigle Distillery in Pittsburgh, moving toward the production of a bonded rye whiskey was practically an outgrowth of its identity, so it had it in mind early on. “We are named for a man, Philip Wigle, who started the Whiskey Rebellion when he punched a federal tax collector,” said Grelli. “The bottled in bond designation is inextricably linked to federal whiskey taxes, and so we knew we wanted to produce a product to celebrate this class of whiskey.”

The days when a typical craft whiskey came from tiny barrels are far behind us now, and the truth is small whiskey distilling in America transitioned to its 2.0 stage a few years ago. Most craft whiskeys are aged for longer periods, while the use of unorthodox grains has grown from blue corn and brewer’s malts to include red corn and exotics like spelt and millet. Although aging whiskey takes time, changing perceptions sometimes takes longer, but any of the expressions listed below ought to help with any lingering doubts.

6 Top Examples of American Whiskey’s Next Wave

Dad’s Hat Bottled in Bond Rye

Mountain Laurel Spirits is not just part of the gaining maturity of craft whiskey, but also a leader in the revival of Pennsylvania Rye. Dad’s Hat make a bold, spicy rye based on an 80 percent rye, 20 percent malted barley mash, which is a true throwback to pre-Prohibition whiskey.

Laws San Luis Valley 6-Year-Old Bonded Rye

Laws Whiskey House followed up raising the age of its bonded four-grain bourbon last year by doing the same with its rye this year. It’s just as novel, too, since extra-aged and bonded rye whiskeys aren’t exactly commonplace on the market.

Old Potrero Hotaling Single Malt

Old Potrero has remained small and has been around for a quarter-century now, which has given it plenty of time to produce some middle-aged and even truly old whiskeys. Those go into its occasional Hotaling releases, the most recent of which was an 11-year-old version of its 100 percent malted rye whiskey from 2017.

St. George’s Spirits Single Malt

Another example of craft whiskey before there was craft whiskey is California’s St. George’s Spirits, and the distillery has been releasing a new lot of its popular single malt for two decades now. Last year’s Lot 19 was made from stock aged in ex-bourbon barrels and sweet port and dessert wine casks for six to eight years.

Tom’s Foolery Bonded Bourbon

Traditional bourbon is made using mostly corn, usually making up about two-thirds to three-quarters of the mash. This Ohio farm distillery makes its bourbon with an exotic mash bill: 54 percent corn, 23 percent rye, and 23 percent malted barley. A recipe like that produces a spirit that draws less flavor from the sweet corn and more from the nutty, fruity barley, while retaining the spicy note found in most of the bourbon made across the Ohio River in Kentucky.

Woodinville Whiskey Company

Sometimes an extra-aged or bonded whiskey from a small distillery is a special one-time or periodic release, and not part of the brand’s regular line-up. Washington’s Woodinville Whiskey, however, has based its flagship bourbon and rye squarely on being at least 5 years old.

The article The Next Wave of American Craft Whiskeys Is Here appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/american-craft-whiskies-new-wave/

[isaiahrippinus]

The Next Wave of American Craft Whiskeys Is Here

American craft whiskey has come a long way in just two decades. The movement started with a handful of distillers who began fermenting in the mid-aughts and has now grown to over 570 small distilleries, according to Bill Owens, president of the American Distilling Institute. Although there were a few small whiskey distilleries around the country that had gotten their starts in the 1990s, outfits like Old Potrero in California and Prichard’s in Tennessee, it’s the distilleries that rose up in that first decade of the new century — the modern pioneers of micro-distilling — that blazed the trail that so many have followed since. Those years saw the birth of a handful of startups in Colorado, New York, and Texas, some of which had to lobby their state governments to amend local law just to allow them to exist.

Yet it wasn’t long after craft whiskey started to gain momentum that some influential cognoscenti began turning their noses up at the spirits made by most small distillers, engendering a dismissive attitude that continues to stick a full decade later among a large slice of enthusiasts. Accompanying all that scoffing are a number of myths about how small distillers make whiskey, notions that were at best only half true in 2010 and are woefully out of date today. These attitudes remain frozen in the craft whiskey 1.0 era, labeling said whiskeys as underaged in small barrels with a flavor profile that is hot, woody, and cloying.

Yet how most small distillers around America make their whiskeys has evolved during the last decade and a half, as lessons were learned and operating scale grew. Early on, small whiskey makers embraced a spirit of innovation, some of them borrowing heavily from craft brewing along the way. Their successes even inspired the big distillers to come around to adopt certain craft-like practices, and now most of the big guys operate a micro-distillery of some description, capable of the small, craft-scale production runs favorable to experimentation (the best example is Buffalo Trace, which runs a separate, small distillery in the same complex as its industrial-scale setup). These trends came full circle when Nicole Austin, who began her distilling career with Kings County in Brooklyn,was named master distiller for George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey in 2018.

American Whiskey Grows Up

Balcones wasn’t the first distillery project to get started in Texas, but it was among the earliest, and its story is arguably the most iconic. Founders Chip Tate and Jared Himstedt famously did much of the construction and fabrication necessary to get the distillery built themselves, inside an old welding shop in Waco. The brand’s first whiskey, Baby Blue, was released in 2010 and was typical of its time in two ways: It innovated by making the first blue corn whiskey, imparting a richer and oilier flavor to the spirit; and used small barrels to reduce aging time down to several months. Baby Blue, although flavorful and unlike anything on store shelves at the time, illustrated both the pros and cons of craft whiskey 1.0.

Pressed by the need to get a whiskey on the market as soon as possible, many early small distillers like Balcones relied upon small barrels to age their whiskeys. Using these small barrels increased the ratio of wood surface area to liquid contained, thereby accelerating some (but not all) aspects of the maturation process. From the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, the term “small barrel” usually meant a cask holding anywhere from 3 to 10 gallons, as opposed to the familiar 53-gallon American Standard Barrel that is the bedrock of the whiskey industries in Kentucky and Tennessee.

In the years that followed, Balcones grew, gained renown, and sought investors. Those investors clashed with co-founder Tate, who sold his share and started a new distilling project. Balcones went on without him to open a new $14 million production facility using large copper pot stills, increasing production by a factor of 10. Yet even before the new facility came online, the company was already using larger barrels, and moving away from its start with tiny barrel aging.

Balcones isn’t alone among the modern pioneers of micro-distilling in making the switch to bigger barrels. Before there was Baby Blue, Tuthilltown’s Hudson Baby Bourbon was made using 3- and 14-gallon barrels, with aging periods ranging from six to 24 months. Tuthilltown now uses 15- and 26-gallon barrels for at least two years of aging, and 53-gallon barrels for at least four years of aging. Brooklyn’s Breuckelen Distilling relies on 25- and 53-gallon barrels. Also in Brooklyn, Kings County Distilling uses 15- and 53-gallon barrels, as does Philadelphia’s Mountain Laurel Spirits, makers of Dad’s Hat Rye. Nowadays 15- to 30-gallons barrels are the norm with small distillers, while 53-gallon American Standard Barrels and the even larger 59-gallon casks made by wine coopers are in more common usage than the tiny 3-gallon and 5-gallon casks that were prevalent in the early days.

The change in barrel stock underscores how whiskey made by small and medium-sized distillers has been gaining in maturity alongside the companies that make them. The malt whiskey made by Stranahan’s, another one of the earliest craft whiskey entrants, has been getting progressively older over the years. This has culminated most recently in the latest iteration of Stranahan’s Diamond Peak, which pairs four years of normal aging in new oak barrels with further aging in a solera system based on a trio of foeders (a type of large wooden cask).

The category-wide shift was driven by a problem inherent with using those tiny, new oak barrels that held less than 10 gallons. Namely, they came with a time limit for aging. Several months in these smaller vessels is ideal, maximizing extraction of color and flavor from the oak. However, using those barrels past a year risks drawing more flavor and tannin than is desirable. Whiskeys over-aged in new oak tend to become astringent and “woody.” In comparison, it could take 20 years for a whiskey to gain over-aged flavors in a 53-gallon barrel, while over-aging can happen in as little as 15 months in a 5-gallon barrel. By transitioning to a mix of larger barrel sizes, distillers were enabled to produce mature, aged whiskies that still retained an identity distinct from that of the big guys of the upper South, who rely entirely on the 53-gallon barrels and a traditional approach to maturation.

The Era of “Bottled In Bond”

The best statement on how craft whiskey has grown up over the last 15 years or so is found on the labels of a growing number of expressions that read “bottled in bond.” The term has been a statement of quality since the passage of the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897. Bonded whiskeys are made by a single distiller from stock made in a single distilling season, aged in a bonded warehouse for a minimum of four years, and bottled at 100 proof. Small distillers value one of those requirements in particular. “Producing a bottled-in-bond whiskey allows us to communicate to customers that Wigle produces whiskey that is older than four years,” says Alex Grelli, co-founder of Wigle Whiskey in Pittsburgh.

Although the small barrels used by many in the early days of craft whiskey could impart vanilla and tannic flavors, some parts of the maturation process demand time — the kind of time a small barrel doesn’t allow for. Over the years spent in the cask, some of the harsher chemicals in the spirit are extracted from the whiskey and into the wood, while others bond with each other and transform or otherwise break down. Young whiskey can be very flavorful, but a smooth and sophisticated character comes only with maturity.

However, few small or medium-sized distillers are able to lay up whiskey for years just to see how it will turn out, and only then develop special products. That’s a luxury for well-funded, large distilleries that can better afford to tie up capital in aging unproven whiskeys. So the introduction of these craft bonded whiskeys is no happy accident. An additional challenge? Smaller barrels have a greater evaporation rate (a.k.a. “the angel’s share”), so the relative loss from a 30-gallon barrel will be significantly higher than from a 53-gallon barrel. Putting out a craft bonded whiskey is the result of farsighted and deliberate planning, embracing the challenges and expenses, and making the changes necessary to accommodate older whiskeys. Some small distillers had the idea of creating a bonded whiskey from the start.

“We never set out to make a super-young whiskey,” says Al Laws, founder of Laws Whiskey House in Denver. “We wanted to be the first bonded four grain bourbon in the U.S. Our bonded whiskeys are true small batches. Not two barrels, but 10, 20, or 30, so we can reach those interested in the flavor experience.”

To meet that goal, Laws relied on 53-gallon barrels from the beginning, and Laws’ Bonded Four Grain Bourbon followed in due course, once the distillery had aged sufficient amounts of 4-year-old whiskey. Following that milestone, it steadily introduced 4-year-old, bonded versions of its other whiskeys. Then the age of those bonded whiskeys began to increase in 2019, with the release of a 6-year-old version of the Bonded Four Grain Bourbon.

For Wigle Distillery in Pittsburgh, moving toward the production of a bonded rye whiskey was practically an outgrowth of its identity, so it had it in mind early on. “We are named for a man, Philip Wigle, who started the Whiskey Rebellion when he punched a federal tax collector,” said Grelli. “The bottled in bond designation is inextricably linked to federal whiskey taxes, and so we knew we wanted to produce a product to celebrate this class of whiskey.”

The days when a typical craft whiskey came from tiny barrels are far behind us now, and the truth is small whiskey distilling in America transitioned to its 2.0 stage a few years ago. Most craft whiskeys are aged for longer periods, while the use of unorthodox grains has grown from blue corn and brewer’s malts to include red corn and exotics like spelt and millet. Although aging whiskey takes time, changing perceptions sometimes takes longer, but any of the expressions listed below ought to help with any lingering doubts.

6 Top Examples of American Whiskey’s Next Wave

Dad’s Hat Bottled in Bond Rye

Mountain Laurel Spirits is not just part of the gaining maturity of craft whiskey, but also a leader in the revival of Pennsylvania Rye. Dad’s Hat make a bold, spicy rye based on an 80 percent rye, 20 percent malted barley mash, which is a true throwback to pre-Prohibition whiskey.

Laws San Luis Valley 6-Year-Old Bonded Rye

Laws Whiskey House followed up raising the age of its bonded four-grain bourbon last year by doing the same with its rye this year. It’s just as novel, too, since extra-aged and bonded rye whiskeys aren’t exactly commonplace on the market.

Old Potrero Hotaling Single Malt

Old Potrero has remained small and has been around for a quarter-century now, which has given it plenty of time to produce some middle-aged and even truly old whiskeys. Those go into its occasional Hotaling releases, the most recent of which was an 11-year-old version of its 100 percent malted rye whiskey from 2017.

St. George’s Spirits Single Malt

Another example of craft whiskey before there was craft whiskey is California’s St. George’s Spirits, and the distillery has been releasing a new lot of its popular single malt for two decades now. Last year’s Lot 19 was made from stock aged in ex-bourbon barrels and sweet port and dessert wine casks for six to eight years.

Tom’s Foolery Bonded Bourbon

Traditional bourbon is made using mostly corn, usually making up about two-thirds to three-quarters of the mash. This Ohio farm distillery makes its bourbon with an exotic mash bill: 54 percent corn, 23 percent rye, and 23 percent malted barley. A recipe like that produces a spirit that draws less flavor from the sweet corn and more from the nutty, fruity barley, while retaining the spicy note found in most of the bourbon made across the Ohio River in Kentucky.

Woodinville Whiskey Company

Sometimes an extra-aged or bonded whiskey from a small distillery is a special one-time or periodic release, and not part of the brand’s regular line-up. Washington’s Woodinville Whiskey, however, has based its flagship bourbon and rye squarely on being at least 5 years old.

The article The Next Wave of American Craft Whiskeys Is Here appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/american-craft-whiskies-new-wave/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/620728922522468352

[mujournalismabroad]

7 Things That Surprised me About Japan

Story by Taylor Banks from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Despite having studied Japanese culture and language for around three years, the MU journalism abroad program through Waseda has been my first opportunity to see Japanese life firsthand. Here are the 7 things that surprised me the most—in no particular order—about life in Japan.

1. The slippers:

I have always known that it is a Japanese custom to take off your shoes before entering a home. However, I was not aware of the fact that you also must change into a pair of slippers before entering. I didn’t know that this also applied to dorms and even some restaurants.

Upon entering the bathroom in the dorm, you must change out of those slippers and put on a pair of rubber sandals. You change back into the slippers just before you leave the bathroom. However, it is uncommon for the Japanese to wear shower shoes in the shower. Note that the toilets and the showers are in separate, unconnected rooms.

In traditional Japanese restaurants, you are expected to take off your shoes before entering a booth. If you leave the designated eating area, they may actually give you another pair of slippers to use just to walk through the hallway.

2. The swastikas:

In Japan, you will occasionally see swastikas on merchandise, maps, and temples. This is because in Japan, the swastika is a symbol for Buddhist temples. The use of the swastika in Buddhism predates WWII and has existed since antiquity. It in NO way refers to Nazi Germany or the genocide of Jewish people.

As a Westerner, I jump out of my skin a little everytime I come across a swastika. In fact, I cannot think of a more offensive symbol by American standards. However, it is important to acknowledge that the swastika means something different here and does not carry the negative stigma that it carries in the West. The Japanese are not Nazis.

3. Most people in Japan rely solely on public transportation:

If you live in Japan, you’ll discover very quickly that the majority of Japanese people do not own a car and many don’t even have a driver’s license. There are car services and taxis, but they are very expensive. As a result, almost everybody travels by train. In fact, it seems that the closer you are to a station, the more shops, restaurants, and people that you see.

The trains are very reliable and stop EXACTLY as scheduled unless there is a delay of some kind. They can be very crowded, and they wait for no one.

The various different rail lines never cease to confuse me, and on many occasions, I would have been screwed if I didn't know how to ask where to go in Japanese.  

4. The Shower Room:

The dorm shower is community style. I was surprised to find that only 3 of the shower stalls were private. The other showers are faucets lined across the wall by a small mirror hung at thigh level. The positioning confused me until I saw girls taking the plastic stools from the corner of the room and using them as chairs while they faced the mirror and washed themselves.

I assumed that the private showers would always be the first ones to be taken, but I was shocked by the fact that most of the girls from Japan and other parts of Asia—which is almost everybody— consistently chose the public showers over the private ones.

I have been aware of the sauna and onsen culture in Japan for some time now, but whenever I see a large group of girls congregating together naked in the same bath tub chatting it up, it triggers my culture shock.

Keep in mind that most of these girls just met in March, and they are all comfortable with being naked together like that, nobody feels self-conscious about their bodies, and nobody sees it as homoerotic in any shape or form. Never in a million years would that happen in the U.S.

5.   The Japanese REALLY love America:  

Despite the rocky history that the U.S. has had with Japan so far, it is obvious upon going to Japan that the majority of Japanese harbor no hard feelings against the U.S. and to the contrary, most likely love America more than a lot of Americans do.

On any given day in Japan, you will see people of all ages wearing clothing or accessories with American flags, city names, flags, sports teams, colleges, and many even flat out have U.S.A written on it.

It is incredibly common, and that is before you take into account the obsession with Disney and The Peanuts cartoons. It is crazy to think that you can find way more Disney and Peanuts merchandise in Japan than you could ever find in the U.S. It is everywhere!

Before I came to Japan, I struggled to find things to bring as souvenirs that would come off as American, but in Japan, I see a lot more merchandise with stars and stripes than I did in the U.S.

They also are obsessed with baseball! On any given day in Tokorozawa—where I live—there are posters of the Saitama Seibu Lions team lining the streets. Not to mention, they play the lion’s team song on the loudspeaker throughout town practically all day every day.

The Japanese also play American music often, and I found several teenagers who are obsessed with Kanye West.  

I have faced absolutely NO hostility for being American in Japan, and to my surprise, a Japanese college student told me straight up that he thought that America was, “the greatest nation in the world.”

6.  The food:

The restaurants usually have large portions for prices that are cheaper than most restaurants in the U.S. However, the grocery store is a different story. There are not a lot of choices at the store, especially not of dairy products or meat, but you can get some of the weirdest seafood ever.

Also, it is not unusual to have a full-bodied fish with eyes, fins, and everything else looking at you at the dinner table. They also like to keep all of the legs and the head on the shrimp.

I’ve heard stories about people eating shrimp and fish while they are still alive too, but I’ve never seen it.

I think the weirdest thing that I’ve seen so far was at a tofu restaurant in Kyoto. There was a pot of soy milk—they have practically no real dairy here—sitting in the center of the table on a heat plate. It was divided into three sections. My first thought was that it would harden into tofu blocks. That wasn't the case, though. The sole purpose of the pot was to heat the milk so that the strange film forms at the top. I thought that they were just removing the film before eating—like I usually do when I make hot chocolate—but they were actually removing the milk film to dip it in soy sauce and eat it. Upon witnessing it, I burst out into laughter. To me, it is like grilling chicken just for the sake of eating the char marks afterward. I couldn’t believe it!

7.  The lines between what is age appropriate seem blurred and non-existent:

In the West, there comes a point where culturally you are supposed to dress a certain way in order to avoid looking childish. Older people are also expected to act a certain way, and when they are caught doing something that some might deem as childish, they are embarrassed. In Japan, it doesn’t seem like there is such a cultural expectation based on age.

For example, adult women occasionally dress like little girls in an attempt to be cute. The frilly doll-like dresses are sold in a lot of places, but it is rare to actually see them worn.  Some women will stand outside in frilly maid costumes to attract male customers. They don’t appear sexy from a Western perspective, but I believe that older Japanese men may beg to differ.

Adult men will occasionally wear clothing with Disney characters or Star Wars characters that look like it was bought from the kid’s section at the store.

If you go to an arcade, the majority of people there are actually adults many of which appear to be in their 50s. They like to smoke a cigarette and play the games while wearing a suit. It is truly a bizarre sight.

Even the old businessmen in suits can be caught playing Pokemon on a DS or with a stuffed Disney keychain hanging from their briefcase.

It is also expensive to live alone, so a lot of adults in their late 20s and 30s remain unmarried and living with their parents.

In the U.S. we have a culture where the second guys hit college, they are encouraged to become frat boy stereotypes that playfully compete with each other by how much they can drink or how many girls they can sleep with. That doesn’t exist in Japan. It seems that Japanese boys often are too shy to adopt that mentality. Most of them do smoke cigarettes though.  

In America, it is mostly older people that smoke cigarettes, but in Japan it is everyone. To see so many young men and women smoking is jarring in my opinion. Not to mention, you could do it in any restaurant here! They occasionally limit it to smoking sections or rooms, but you still usually smell it.

I hope that you learned something new from this post. I will continue to keep you posted. As we say in Japan, またね！See you later!

[lindyhunt]

9 VR Marketing Examples That You'll Want to Steal for 2019

I won't lecture you on the importance of incorporating virtual reality (VR) into your marketing strategy.

What I will do, however, is share a few fun facts about VR and show you nine examples of this technology used for marketing a product or a brand.

By 2020, the economic impact of virtual and augmented reality is predicted to reach $29.5 billion.

By the end of 2017, the number of shipped units of VR software and hardware from Sony, Oculus, HTC, and others totaled $2.4 million, up from $1.7 million in 2016.

By 2020, the number of VR headsets sold is predicted to reach 82 million -- a 1,507% increase from 2017 predicted totals.

VR is being adopted quickly, and adding it to your marketing channels is something you should definitely think about for the coming year.

What Is VR?

VR, short for virtual reality, is a form of interactive software that immerses users in a three-dimensional environment -- usually by way of a headset with special lenses -- to simulate a real experience. Ideally, VR allows people to simulate the experience in 360 degrees.

Numerous industries are now finding uses for VR in order to transport people to places they might otherwise have to travel to, or simply imagine. While movie companies, for example, are giving audiences the opportunity to experience the movie as if they're a character in the scene, conventional businesses are now using VR to demonstrate and promote their products to potential customers.

Before we dive into some of the businesses that have found success injecting their marketing with a dose of VR, it's worth noting that virtual reality has a few key differences from another term you might've heard before: augmented reality. Find out what these differences are in the video below.

Seeking inspiration for your own VR marketing campaign? Look no further. Below are nine of our favorite VR marketing campaigns and how they served the company's marketing strategy.

Virtual Reality (VR) Marketing Examples

Key Technology: VERYX Food Sorting

Defy Ventures and Within: Step To The Line

Limbic Life: Project VITALICS

Lowe's: Holoroom How To

Boursin: The Sensorium

Adidas: Delicatessen

Toms: Virtual Giving Trip

DP World: Caucedo Facilities Tour

TopShop: Catwalk VR Experience

1. Key Technology: VERYX Food Sorting

Key Technology, a manufacturer and designer of food processing systems, created a Virtual Reality demo that would allow attendees of the Pack Expo food packaging trade show to experience a detailed, hands-on look at how the company's VERYX digital food sorting platform works. It was part of a comprehensive B2B campaign to grow brand awareness among a target audience of food manufacturers, and VR gave participants a highly unique look at what exactly the process looks like inside of the machine.

While this 360-degree video doesn't completely replicate the experience, it does indicate the differentiating way brands within such B2B industries as manufacturing can leverage VR to immersively demonstrate their sophisticated technologies and capabilities.

2. Defy Ventures and Within: Step To The Line

When my colleague attended Oculus Connect in October, the most memorable experience for her was, by far, the event's VR For Good exhibit: a showcase of creative work that used Oculus and VR technology for social- and mission-focused ventures.

One such example of that work was Step To The Line: A short film (that was immersively viewed on a VR headset) documenting the lives of inmates at California maximum-security prisons. It was created by Within, a VR storytelling production company, in partnership with Defy Ventures, an entrepreneurship and development program for men, women, and youth who are currently or were formerly incarcerated.

With this unique watching experience, viewers were able to uniquely see what life is like within the walls of these correctional facilities, from the yard, to the cells, to the conversations that take place there.

3. Limbic Life: Project VITALICS

For far too many people, injuries, age, and disease can diminish mobility and equilibrium to the point where walking ranges from extremely painful to nearly impossible.

That's why the folks at Limbic Life created the Limbic Chair, in partnership with the VITALICS research being conducted by RehaClinic. Pairing this special chair with a Gear VR headset allows users to more intuitively move their bodies (thanks to the chair's combined neuroscience-based and ergonomic design) while virtually experiencing day-to-day experiences with a rehabilitative use of their hands and legs.

While the research is still underway and no definitive conclusions have been drawn, my coworker had the opportunity to use the chair at the 2017 Samsung Developer Conference and speak with the chair's creator, Dr. Patrik Künzler.

"Patients enjoy being in the chair and the freedom of movement it allows. They enjoy VR a lot, especially the flying games," he told Samsung Business Insights. And not only can the VR technology help them physically heal, but it also contributes to emotional rehabilitation.

"When they get up from the chair," Künzler said, "they’re in a good mood and feel happy.”

Learn more about the conceptualization behind the Limbic Chair from Künzler's TEDxZurich talk below.

4. Lowe's: Holoroom How To

Anyone who's gone through the existential angst of being a first-time buyer knows the unfathomable power of paperwork and finances to undermine the fun of designing or decorating a new home.

That is, until you walk into one of 19 Lowe's stores that features the Holoroom How To VR experience.

Some homeowners are lucky enough to pay a professional to renovate their home when it needs to be. For others -- Lowe's core buyer -- the next stop is the world of do-it-yourself (DIY) home improvement, which comes with its own hefty dose of stress.

That's why Lowe's decided to step in and help out homeowners -- or recreational DIY enthusiasts -- with a virtual skills-training clinic that uses HTC Vive headsets that guides participants through a visual, educational experience on the how-to of home improvement.

5. Boursin: The Sensorium

One of my colleagues recently pledged to give up dairy -- okay, 48 hours ago -- and she already claims to miss cheese, a lot.

You can imagine her happiness, then, when she discovered that the cheese brand Boursin once created a VR experience to take users on a multi-sensory journey through a refrigerator to shed light on its products' flavor profiles, food pairings, and recipe ideas.

The goal: to raise awareness among U.K. consumers of Boursin's distinct taste and product selection.

While the VR installment was part of a live experiential marketing campaign, the rest of us can get a taste -- pun intended -- of the virtual experience via this YouTube video.

6. Adidas: Delicatessen

In 2017, Adidas partnered with Somewhere Else, an emerging tech marketing agency, to follow the mountain-climbing journey of two extreme athletes sponsored by TERREX (a division of Adidas).

And what good is mountain climbing to an audience if you can't give them a 360-degree view of the journey?

Viewers were able to follow the climbers, Ben Rueck and Delaney Miller, literally rock for rock and climb along with them. You heard that right -- Using a VR headset and holding two sensory remote controls in each hand, viewers could actually scale the mountain of Delicatessen right alongside Rueck and Miller.

This VR campaign, according to Somewhere Else, served to "find an unforgettable way to market TERREX, [Adidas's] line of outdoor apparel & accessories." What the company also did, however, was introduce viewers to an activity they might have never tried otherwise. Instill an interest in the experience first, and the product is suddenly more appealing to the user.

Check out the campaign's trailer below.

7. Toms: Virtual Giving Trip

Toms, a popular shoe company, is well known for donating one pair of shoes to a child in need every time a customer buys their own pair. Well, this charitable developer found a new way to inspire its customers to give -- wearing a VR headset.

The Toms Virtual Giving Trip is narrated by Blake Mycoskie, the founder and Chief Shoe Giver of Toms, and one of his colleagues.

As they describe the story of Toms' founding, their VR experience takes viewers on a trip through Peru, where Blake and the shoe-giving team visit a school of children who are about to receive the shoes they need for the first time.

What Toms' VR campaign does so well is something cause-driven organizations all over the world struggle to do: Show donors exactly where their money is going. Even without a VR headset, the video below gives you an experience that's intimate enough to put Toms on your list for your next shoe purchase.

8. DP World: Caucedo Facilities Tour

DP World is a global trade company that helps businesses transport goods around the world. As the company opens new terminals, however, they need a way to show their customers what DP World's property has to offer.

DP World's recently opened Caucedo facility in the Dominican Republic is just one of several DP World properties that uses VR to promote its large and often mysterious ships and land masses as they suddenly appear in a community.

Is trade logistics a sexy industry? Not to everyone. But that's exactly why a 360-degree tour of DP World's terminal is so valuable here. Show people just how efficient, safe, and crucial these properties are to certain businesses -- without making them put on a hardhat and walk through the port itself -- and you can gain massive community support.

9. TopShop: Catwalk VR Experience

Just because you couldn't attend TopShop's fashion show during London's Fashion Week doesn't mean you couldn't still "be there."

TopShop, a women's fashion retailer, partnered with Inition, an emerging tech agency, to give customers a "virtual" seat of their fashion show by wearing a VR headset connected to the event as it was happening.

The groundbreaking campaign put viewers right next to the fashion runway and the seats of the celebrities who were attending. Talk about making sure your brand is inclusive ...

Check out the video below, recapping the experience.

Want to see how other emerging technologies will impact your marketing? Check out A Practical Approach to Emerging Tech for SMBs: AI, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, IoT, and AR/VR.