Oh Taste & See: Pendleton Blended Canadian Whisky

What makes a whisky Canadian? Well I guess if you ask the folks at Hood River Distillers, the Oregon-based bottlers of Pendleton Blended Canadian Whisky, the only requirement is for the liquid in the bottle to have been distilled and aged in Canada. Given how much I like their product, I won't argue with them at all.

Pendleton is named after Oregon's Pendleton Round-Up, one of the worlds longest-running rodeos. The bottle features the Round-Up's bucking bronco logo, and all of the marketing seeks to tie this whisky to the romance and intrigue of cowboys and rodeo culture. In fact a portion of the proceeds from each bottle is donated to the Pendleton Round-Up. That's all great, but it does even more to make this seem like a distinctly American (Oregonian?) whisky, even if the liquid itself was made in Canada and the bottle says Canadian Whisky. Oh well, enough nitpickin' about Pendleton's provenance, how does it drink?

Read more »

Canadian Whisky Getting Some Respect

This recent article from the New York Times gives Canadian whisky a bit of attention that it isn't used to getting. Always the backbone of cheap whisky cocktails and a go-to for old-timers everywhere, Canadian whisky is now aspiring to rival its flashier Scotch and Bourbon competitors with unique, higher-end bottlings. Some of these more sophisticated Canadian whiskys are coming from the major international spirits conglomerates (such as Collingwood Canadian whisky from Brown Forman), while others come from smaller distillers trying their hand at innovative new techniques (such as Forty Creek).

One Canadian whisky that the NYTimes article doesn't discuss, perhaps because it's actually blended and bottled in Hood River, Oregon, is Pendleton, which I will be reviewing in my next blog post.