Two-Nineteen + Found North in 2023
For our fourth partnership of 2023, I’m happy to announce that Two-Nineteen will be teaming up with Found North to bring you loads of Canadian whiskey goodness!
“We wanted to start a whiskey brand for more than a decade, but we weren’t convinced we could create something different that was really good,” Zach Taylor told me earlier this year during a conversation with him and his brother Nick—the co-founders of Found North; “Starting a craft distillery meant we’d have no product for a long time, or we’d have to source from someone like MGP, but we didn’t think we could differentiate ourselves with either of those options.”
I’ve thought those same options hundreds of times, wondering what I would I do were I to ever start my own whiskey brand. Do I want to invest millions in a distillery that might never make it? Or do I want to be the 500th new MGP-distilled whiskey brand on the market this year?
Hence, why I don’t own my own whiskey brand. But Zach and Nick had a great idea: look north.
“The Canadians think of the distilling and the aging process as prepping the paints, not painting the picture,” Nick added, explaining why he and his brother began looking north of the border for a solution; “In the US, much of the flavor decisions are made during distillation and maturation. Their paintings are more than half finished when they come out of the barrel.”
Earlier in the year, I had written an article describing the Found North whiskies as such: “It’s not quite Bourbon, but it’s definitely not your typical Canadian whiskey. It’s as if Crown Royal and George T. Stagg had a baby, and this is what came out. For those of you longing to see Canadian whiskey blended and bottled with a Kentucky mindset, you’ve found your brand.”
The brothers agreed with that assessment completely.
“The really interesting question for us was: why aren’t Canadians making whiskey like this?” Nick asked; “With the pandemic happening, I’ve been tuning into presentations from Canadian distillers where they’re upfront about watering the whiskey down, adding caramel coloring, filtering, and other practices that have become somewhat taboo from the American perspective. The explanation is: this is just how we do it.”
Zach and Nick began the Found North project by sourcing samples of different Canadian whiskies with the intention of bottling them as individual labels. There was just one major problem: they didn’t taste all that interesting on their own.
“We found a number of very cool whiskies, but we didn’t want to bottle any of them as a single entity.” Zach explained; “Canadian whiskey was designed to give the blender a number of assets to create. It’s like a huge tool set to create whiskey on the back end.” In short, it gave them the freedom to create an American version of Canadian whisky.
Of course, not everyone is fired up about the Americanization of long-standing traditions with distilled spirits. The French, for example, aren’t interested in creating high-proof, additive-free brandies just to capitalize on the current Bourbon fad. “Yet, there are other brands crushing in the United States that are moving towards that consumer,” Nick stated; “So why not make something for that audience?”
Canadian whiskey for Bourbon fans? That’s exactly what Found North is. I’m very excited to be working with them in 2023.
-David Driscoll