During the peak of the pandemic, Chris Stapleton often woke up to find unmarked small bottles of whiskey on his doorstep. His bassist, JT Cure, would quietly drop off caches of coffee booze at a few select homes, and later that day, Stapleton, Cure and friends would do a blind taste test on Zoom.
“That was our social activity,” says Stapleton. “Inevitably it would end up with a bunch of kids smiling at Zoom, but it was fun.”
Stapleton didn't know it at the time, but the tasting experience would serve him well when it came time to sample various prototypes of the Traveler, the new blended whisky made with Buffalo Trace Distillery, a distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail not far from where Stapleton grew up in Lexington. Released nationally this month, Traveler — named after Stapleton's breakthrough 2015 album — is a collaboration between the singer and Buffalo Trace master distiller Harlen Wheatley. Stapleton says he's been approached several times in the past about getting into the celebrity alcohol business, but until now it just wasn't right.
“I've had people push me to do 'slap your name on the bottle,' and I had no real interest,” he says during a Zoom with Wheatley and Rolling rock. “I wanted it to feel authentic and beyond that, I just wanted it to be good.” For a country star who has a lot of songs about whiskey — “The Bottom” on the new album Higher“Whiskey and You,” “Whiskey Sunrise,” the juggernaut “Tennessee Whiskey,” among them — it couldn't be more natural.
Travel Whiskey
Stapleton, wearing a baseball cap with the logo of the Nashville minor league Sound, is taking a few days off in Florida. But he can't escape the southern cold: he spent the morning crawling under the house with a blower, trying to thaw the frozen pipes.
After such an ordeal, it sounds like a glass of Traveler might be in order. It's only late morning, so Stapleton isn't drinking his product yet, but he clarifies that he is, in fact, drinking, dispelling some reports online that he had gotten sober.
“I think the word 'sober' was used in an interview, and it's probably an injustice to sober people to call me sober – certainly as we sit here talking about drinking,” he says. “I don't drink as much as I used to. I'm a 45 year old man with a lot more responsibilities and a lot less time for leisure than I used to have. But I enjoy it. In the first room you walk into my house, there's probably 200 bottles of bourbon in there.”
But in the last year, he has focused only on the one that bears his name. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with Wheatley and his team, he experimented with various blends until they arrived at the flavor profile—sweet at the start, a bit of spice, a strong finish—that would become Traveller. When it came time to test the final product, he once again called on Avengers: Cure whiskey engineer Vance Powell and guitarist Mike Harris, who played in Stapleton's band before his current role in Old Crow Medicine Show . “They are couples whose palates I really trust,” says Stapleton. “We had these tastings and came to the same conclusion that Harlen did: This is the one.”
Master distiller Harlen Wheatley with Chris Stapleton on barrel. Photo: Traveler Whiskey*
Wheatley says they had a specific image in mind when making the whisky, an image they see manifested by fans and consumers on social media from Traveler (retails at $39.99) he fell. “We see all these posts,” says Wheatley. “There's a person sitting there, looking at the bottle, drinking it, enjoying it and listening to great music. Chris has great songs, so they go well together.”
“Good whiskey is like a good song. No explanation needed. One taste should tell you all you need to know,” Stapleton wrote in a personal note that adorns the back of each bottle. “I wrote drafts of it and did all the editing,” he says now. “I've spent as much time working on these parts of this project as I can in recent memory, including records and touring.”
According to Stapleton, he's already making plans for how he'll celebrate his 10th anniversary next year Traveler, the album. “We are working on it. We're going to do something different,” he says.
In March, he'll be back on the road for his All-American Road Show tour, an ongoing trek that finds him playing arenas with openers like Lainey Wilson, War and Treaty and Grace Potter, and peaking at festivals like New Orleans JazzFest. Now that he has his own whiskey, it's a fair bet Traveler will be in the background.
So how does Stapleton drink it? Not in cocktails. “It takes too long,” he says. “Just pour it in the glass and off we go.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/chris-stapleton-not-sober-traveller-whiskey-1234950095/