FEW Rye is made from a mash of 70% rye, 20% corn and 10% malted barley. "The corn comes from a farmers co-op in Indiana and my barley and rye from farmers in Wisconsin," notes Paul Hletko, owner and Master Distiller. After milling, mashing and fermenting the grains, Hletko distills the wash through his 1,500-liter Kothe copper-pot still imported from Germany.

Michter's Pot Still Sour Mash Whiskey, which was the company's most popular expression before it declared bankruptcy in 1919, is made in accordance with original sour mash tradition. By using sour mash, which refers to the art of using a small amount of spent mash from an older batch of whiskey in order to catalyze fermentation in a new batch of whiskey, Pratt is able to maintain consistency with each bottling. While Magliocco readily admits that he wanted to pay tribute to the original Michter's Sour Mash, which was comprised of a mash of 50% rye, 38% corn and 12% barley, the current release isn't an attempt to reproduce it exactly. Rather, it was inspired by the older version, but with the intention of improving it. "If it was like everything else," says Magliocco, "we wouldn't have released it."