An Exclusive First Taste Of Whiskey Superstar Nicole Austin's New Orphan Barrel Limited Edition

Pretty bottle, pretty whiskey. Photo courtesy Diageo

When the PR folks representing Diageo asked me to do an exclusive writeup breaking the news of the latest Orphan Barrel release, I immediately said yes because Nicole Austin was involved. If you aren’t familiar, she broke out with Brooklyn-based Kings County Distillers about a decade ago, and then in 2018 became GM and distiller at Cascade Hollow in Tullahoma, which produces George Dickel. She’s transformed it from being the Tennessee whisky that isn’t Jack Daniel’s into one of the hottest whiskey brands in America.

Cascade Hollow has a lot of top-notch aged whisky in its single-story rickhouses, and Austin has proved she’s really good at picking out the best barrels. So I was 99.9% sure Copper Tongue, her first collaboration with Orphan Barrel, was not going to suck. Still, I had to lay down ground rules. This wasn’t going to be an advertorial. If I hated the whiskey, I was going to say so in print. And I also had some… strong opinions about the Orphan Barrel series that I wasn’t going to keep to myself. The PR team, bless their hearts, said okey-dokey, and so did my editor at Robb Report.

Thursday afternoon, I got to taste it and walk through it a little with Ms. Austin herself (via Zoom), and — spoiler alert — it did not suck. It was the first time I’d gotten to chat with her one-on-one, and I hope to heck it won’t be the last. 23 hours later, I’d pounded out a 1,000 word article that hopefully also doesn’t suck, with a little background about Austin, Orphan Barrel, and of course Copper Tongue. If you want to read it, click right here on this link and you will be teleported over to Robb Report. Enjoy! And if you see a bottle of Copper Tongue, my advice is to snap it up pronto.