Distillery
WhistlePig
In 2007, Raj Bhakta bought a 500-acre former dairy farm in Shoreham, Vermont, in the United States. He wanted to build a rye whisky operation from the ground up, growing the grain himself rather than buying it. Dave Pickerell, the former master distiller at Maker's Mark, joined him to shape WhistlePig's early blends. WhistlePig didn't distill on site at first. It bottled aged Canadian rye while planting rye grain across the farm. In 2015, the company opened its own distillery in a converted, century-old barn, finally making whisky start to finish in Vermont. The farm's two founding pigs, Mortimer and Mauve, are more than mascots. When they died, WhistlePig had their ashes placed in a granite memorial on the property and named its two pot stills after them. It is a small, personal touch on a whisky built from scratch.
