In the last five years, there are few American companies that have carved out a spirits niche quite like Found North. A non-distilling producer, the brand specializes in blended Canadian whisky at cask strength, which often includes a wide range of aged components in addition to intricate cask finishes. Perhaps most impressively, they’ve grown by marketing to bourbon consumers, not a group traditionally known for its love of Canadian distillate.
Of course, Found North isn’t the first American brand to build a fan base on the back of Canadian liquid. But they’ve certainly taken things a step further by making the whisky’s origin a front-and-center selling point. Be it changing tides, shifting consumer perceptions, or highly-rated whisky, something has clearly been catching on. While we don’t have specific sales data, the brand’s limited expressions — including premium releases like the evocatively named Peregrine, Hell Diver, and Hover Hawk — are now sold via online lottery due to high demand. I’ve also seen many of their private barrel collaborations and blends sell out in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
Recently, Drinkhacker sat down with Nick Taylor, Found North’s Co-Founder and Head Blender, to learn about the company’s growth and the intricacies of marketing Canadian whisky to the bourbon drinking consumer.
(Note: This interview has been edited for readability.)
Drinkhacker: How did Found North come about?
Nick Taylor: When you create a whisky, you’re not just making good whisky, you’re creating a narrative. We started in 2020, right as Covid hit. We had just met with a producer of Canadian whisky. They had told us some of the old stocks that they had, and we basically had a very simple thesis, which was that drinkers of premium whisky in America are already consuming old, good Canadian whisky under American labels. So we thought, if we can be up front about what this is and market it, folks already enjoying this style are going to be appreciative of that.
We named the company Found North, and we immediately put on the label where it’s from. In all our copy, we were always super up front. “Hey, we used these three whiskies, we used these five whiskies. Here’s the blend, here are the ratios, here are the percentages.” There are a lot of misconceptions about Canadian whisky. Our feeling was that transparency was table stakes. People think Canadian and they think the 9.09 rule, [that up to 9.09% of a Canadian whisky can be non-Canadian spirits], or they think you can put neutral grain spirits in it — which you can’t, by the way.
In the last 10 years, you have all of these non-whisky categories like rum and agave being consumed by serious whisky drinkers under the conditions of transparency. Look at Foursquare Rum. A couple rules: cask strength, non-chill filtered, natural color. That’s it. And if you do that, people are really willing to at least take a swing on your product, even if it doesn’t adhere to the category they traditionally drink.
The weird thing about Canadian whisky is that the distillate is excellent. The history is really rich, and yet the Canadian producers make a product that is very fit for the Canadian consumer and the mass consumer, not the super premium American whisky drinker. And there is this big disconnect, which created a niche for us to fill. That’s Found North in a nutshell.
Drinkhacker: In hindsight, what were some milestones that helped you recognized you were catching on among American consumers? Specifically the bourbon crowd?
Nick Taylor: When we started, we intended on making pretty much exclusively rye whisky. Several brands had done that. But the most important thing is that the whisky slaps , the whisky’s got to be good. Don’t make something for the sake of the age statement. Don’t make something for the sake of anything. If the whisky starts tasting really good as you’re blending it because you’re doing something that maybe doesn’t fit what you expected, don’t run away from that. Lean into it. Our first batch was 66% rye. Batch two was supposed to be a rye, but we had this incredible corn component that was 20 years old: 13 years in ex-bourbon and then transferred into new oak for seven years.
The profile of this whisky, it wasn’t exactly bourbon, but my goodness, was it bringing a lot of the things that we love about bourbon. We were using this to soften the rye, but as a minority component in the blend. And as we increased the corn, the whisky just got better and better, and all of a sudden we were at 60% corn, 40% rye, completely uncategorized whisky. It’s not bourbon, it’s not rye, we weren’t making it in Canada. We couldn’t even call it Canadian anything. We ended up registering it as “cask strength whisky,” the broadest possible category. We ended up at 80% corn, 19% rye, 1% malted barley.
We didn’t think it would sell at all. We thought for batch three, we’re going to go back to making rye. That’s where we were in our heads. We sent samples to Mission Liquor in California. Dave Driscoll was the guy at the time there. He tasted it and asked if he could buy all of the batch. Whatever isn’t sold, I’ll buy. He ended up writing an email out to his customer base, and he said something like, “If you didn’t get George T. Stagg this year, try Found North Batch Two.” The thing sold out in five seconds.
Rye whisky from 2000 to 2020 was one of the fastest growing categories from a percentage standpoint, because in 2000 there were about a hundred thousand cases sold in the U.S. By 2020 when there were about 1.7 million cases sold in the U.S. But there were still something like 30 million cases of bourbon sold. So if you make something that tastes akin to rye versus something that tastes akin to bourbon, which one do you think is going to do better in this market? Now it’s really obvious, but at the time it was not obvious. We were very delightfully wrong.
Drinkhacker: What are some misconceptions you think the average bourbon drinker has about Canadian whisky?
Nick Taylor: The first is that Canadians are putting random stuff in their blends all the time. That’s the 9.09 rule. It was a tax incentive thing that really was designed to allow Canadians to put American whiskey in their blends and then get a tax incentive from the U.S. government. But as a result, I think people often conflate Canadian blended whisky with American blended whiskey. American blended whiskey can have 80% neutral grain spirits in it and still call it whiskey, which is ridiculous.
And then there’s this rule that confuses people and they think that the Canadians are just slapping all of this unaged stuff into these blends, and therefore the age statements are fake and things like that. And it’s just not true. I’ve seen a few whiskies that take advantage of the 9.09 rule, and usually they’re putting in really old Armagnac, something really good.
The second misconception is really interesting. It’s that Canadian whisky isn’t complex, that it’s just base whisky distilled to a very high proof. I used to think, “Well, I like pot distilled, single malt Scotch because it has a higher congener count, And it’s more complex because it’s not distilled to a higher proof.” And, and in my head, I was against Canadian whisky in the earlier days of my career because of the numbers and because of some notions I had about corn whisky. I don’t think Canadians don’t do themselves any favors by calling it base whisky. For awhile, I just wanted the rye, because their rye is generally either pot distilled or single column distilled.
But the reality is when you, when you blend whisky, you don’t take your most complex whisky “A” and your most complex whisky “B,” slap them together, and get super duper complex whisky. It doesn’t work like that. Blending is very akin to making music. If you have a rocking guitar solo and a great drum solo, and they’re not in the same time signature and they don’t have anything to do with each other, you can’t just slap ’em together and get good music. It just creates a cacophony of noise. What the Canadians are really good at is making component whiskies, particularly these individual components that nail a layer of flavor.
When you have a really lovely rye, you can layer these beautiful resonant whiskies that aren’t complex. They enhance the whisky and they’re easy to blend with, and they give you an enormous amount of freedom as a blender to control the final product. I never appreciated the value of corn components. I never appreciated the value of things that were distilled to a higher proof because I believed that they weren’t inherently complex. Before Found North, I was selling whisky for a living, and I still didn’t really understand this. It wasn’t until I started blending that it became apparent to me that these Canadian distillates are made to be blended to give flexibility and freedom to the final producer.
It makes Canadian whisky awesome. I can’t begin to tell you how cool it is to work with Canadian whisky. You have as much freedom as you want because they aren’t creating a final product when they distill it, they’re creating something that will inherently work very well with something else they’re creating.
The post Like Making Music: The Secrets of Canadian Whisky with Found North Blender Nick Taylor appeared first on Drinkhacker: The Insider’s Guide to Good Drinking.