Flavoured bourbon becomes all the rage: FEW whiskey and Chameleon coffee collaborate
The temperance women would be aghast. In Evanston, north of Chicago, where they had their headquarters, the craft distiller FEW has collaborated with a coffee company from Texas to produce – shock horror – a bourbon whiskey finished in coffee barrels. The bourbon – FEW Chameleon – won the collaboration award at the Beverage Forum, held in Chicago 24-25 April 2018.
In the flavour feud between vodka and whiskey craft distillers did not want to be left out. After a chance meeting at last year’s Beverage Forum, Paul Hletko, the founder of FEW, and Chris Campbell from Chameleon Cold Brew coffee of Austin, Texas, decided to do a collaboration.
Founded in 2010, Chameleon has become the number one organic cold brew brand in the US and was sold to Swiss company Nestlé in late 2017. FEW, which uses the initials of Frances Elizabeth Willard, the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement and champion of Prohibition, opened in 2011 in Evanston, which had been a dry city for nearly a century. Mr Hletko, a patent attorney, worked with the city to overturn the century-old laws and FEW became the first distillery within the city limits.
As Mr Hletko told BRAUWELT International, FEW took barrels of their bourbon, and emptied them into totes. Chameleon had sent them a tote of their cold brew coffee, and they filled the now empty barrels with the cold brew coffee. “After resting the coffee in the barrels, we emptied the barrels again, and re-filled them with the same bourbon that had been in the barrels and finished the whiskey in the coffee barrel. It was finished in the barrels for about four months”, Mr Hletko explained.
However, they only produced about 600 bottles, which are all available in Texas, mostly in Austin. Most likely they have already been sold by the time you read this.
There were nearly 1,600 distilleries in the US in August 2017. The market share of craft distilleries was three percent according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
