ONE FOR THE ROAD

America’s premier luxury rye distillers WhistlePig reveal their most innovative whiskey yet

- NICOLAS STECHER

It’s barely past nine a.m. and the temperatures at the Radford Racing school outside Phoenix are already eclipsing triple digits. The smooth blacktop appears to be cracking before our eyes, but it’s all good—it’s a dry heat. Veteran automotive T.V. hosts Chris Jacobs (Discovery) and Cristy Lee (ESPN, SPEED, MotorTrend, etc.) have just spent the last half-hour lighting up the skid pad in a most curious vehicle: the WhistlePig Dodge Hellcat. Onlookers whoop it up as their twirling donut dance gushes volumes of white smoke into the morning air. The shenanigans, and torque, are dialed up to eleven.

This is no ordinary Hellcat mind you, it’s the WhistlePig edition—modified to run not on pure petroleum, but fuel of another sort altogether: premium rye whiskey. Vinyl-wrapped with bowtied pigs, barrels, wood, and all things cooperage, the gurgling muscle car draws stares wherever it rumbles.

“We took 10-year WhistlePig Rye and it had to go through three additional distillations to get it to like 99% ABV,” explains WhistlePig’s Chief Marketing Officer Jason Newell of the unorthodox petrol. “After multiple distillations and another process to increase the ABV, it’s super pure—so our partners at VP Racing fuels were able to engineer a performance fuel mixture for us to play with.”

“Well, if you’re going to distill the whiskey into fuel, why not just use straight-up white dog off the still?” I yell over the din of supercharged V8s. “Why use a whiskey that’s spent a decade aging in a barrel?” Jason blinks, as if teaching quantum theory to a two-year-old. “Because it’s WhistlePig,” he says flatly, “and we wanted to use aged whiskey.”