Discovery Club August 2025: New Holland Brewing & Distilling
Hey, everybody. I’m really excited to announce the August Lost Lantern Discovery Club monthly release.
This month’s Discovery Club release is a finished bourbon from New Holland Brewing & Distilling Company in New Holland, Michigan. Specifically, it’s a bourbon finished in casks that previously held Dragon’s Milk Stout, one of New Holland’s signature beers (and probably the one that’s the best known outside of that part of the country).
This whiskey is a number of firsts:
- It’s our first-ever beer-finished bourbon (although we’ve done a beer-finished single malt before)
- It’s the first finished bourbon of any type in the Discovery Club
- It’s our first release from New Holland
- It’s our first release from the state of Michigan
- It’s our first release from a major craft brewery + distillery
This whiskey is also part of a trend that we’re actively highlighting this year: new American finishes, new types of barrel finishing that are uniquely locally rooted and distinct from worldwide finishing traditions like sherry and port casks. The Lost Lantern Spring 2025 Collection was entirely focused on this idea, and featured a range of distilleries and unique finishes from across the country. This month’s Discovery Club release also fits that theme, and it could easily have been part of our spring release. These new finishing trends are one of the most exciting areas of American whiskey today, and something we will absolutely continue to highlight. Hence the first finished bourbon in the Discovery Club!
Introducing New Holland Brewing & Distilling Co.
New Holland Brewing & Distilling is the largest distillery we’ve featured yet in the Discovery Club. In fact, they are large enough that we debated whether they were the right fit, since they’re relatively well known in some circles. But ultimately, their whiskey is only available in a handful of states, and even where you can get it, you probably can’t find it at cask strength. So even if you’ve heard of them, there’s a good chance you’ve never tried their whiskey — despite the growing acclaim they’re receiving in the bourbon world (our friends at Breaking Bourbon are consistently big fans).
This is also the first major brewery we’ve worked with at Lost Lantern. The craft brewing movement was a direct predecessor to the craft distilling movement, and craft brewing honestly remains more mainstream and influential than the world of craft spirits (although they’re certainly catching up fast!). It’s hard to believe that IPAs, stouts, and everything besides cheap mass-market beers were once rare, but it’s true, and craft brewing has been truly transformative for the way people drink over the last several decades. In the last decade or so, some of the country’s largest craft breweries have expanded into distilling, and this is the first time we’ve partnered with one of these large craft breweries.
Located in western Michigan in between Lake Michigan and Grand Rapids (a true hub of craft brewing), New Holland began in 1997 with a mission to brew world-class beer. They brew a full range of beer, but the one they’re best known for outside of their home turf is certainly their Dragon’s Milk stout, introduced in 2001 as one of the first and most prominent bourbon barrel-aged stouts. New Holland expanded into distilling early, all the way back in 2008 (for context, there were less than 200 distilleries in the whole country back then, compared to over 2,000 today). While many breweries end up making single malt (and New Holland does as well!), it was one of the first breweries to start making bourbon: it’s what their signature beer was finished in, after all! And from there, it was a natural leap to start finishing their bourbon in the very beer barrels their Dragon’s Milk stout had been in.
We have been fans of New Holland for a while. In fact, Nora and I first visited the distillery in 2019, on a month-long road trip we took all across the Midwest. As you know, we’ve been to hundreds of distilleries now, and a fair number of breweries too, and there’s one thing that I really want to emphasize: the scale of a large craft brewery absolutely dwarfs even the largest craft distilleries. And New Holland is quite sizable: in fact, it’s now the largest independent brewery in Michigan and one of the 100 largest craft breweries in the country (the exact ranking varies by year). Big craft breweries have rows upon rows of huge tanks, endless hoses and pumps, and they tend to be spotlessly clean: beer is far more vulnerable to contamination and off-flavors than whiskey is, thanks to the distillation process.
The distillery itself is not nearly as large. In fact, it’s centered on a beautiful yet moderately sized antique pot still. Of course, the nice thing about having a full-scale brewery already is that the distillery doesn’t need much space, since you already have most of tanks you need on that side. You just need room for a still and some other equipment, and of course, for all the barrels.
The Discovery Club Cask
This is the rare Discovery Club post where I won’t talk all that much about climate. In part that’s because Michigan is pretty temperate, thanks to its location in the Midwest and the balancing effects of the Great Lakes. And in part it’s because that’s just not the focus of this particular release. New Holland is the pioneer of beer-barrel finished bourbon, a uniquely American style. And that’s what our Discovery Club is all about: showcasing how a stout finish can make a great bourbon even better.
The August Discovery Club single cask is a four-year-old Michigan straight bourbon whiskey that was finished for an additional two years and five months in a New Holland Dragon’s Milk stout barrel (for a total age of a little over six years). As usual, it’s bottled at cask strength (in this case 58.3% ABV) and was not chill filtered. Because it’s a finished bourbon rather than a straight bourbon, it comes in our cream-colored label, a first for the Discovery Club. 
The beauty of any good stout finish, including this one, is that it accentuates bourbon’s natural character. Just as sherry is a natural complement to Scotch single malt, stout casks are a natural complement to bourbon. They highlight the rich chocolate, cocoa, oak, and spice notes that bourbon already has — adding depth, rather than just layering on unrelated flavors.
Our Discovery Club single cask is a perfect example. It builds on an already excellent bourbon, deepening its character and creating something truly distinctive. It has notes of black forest cake and dried figs on the nose, reflecting the stout finish. The palate has spicy oak, warm chocolate, and bright vanilla notes, balanced out by hints of chocolate mousse on the finish. This is a very complex bourbon that will reward you for sitting with it and letting it evolve in the glass for a while.
This release is slightly larger than past Discovery Club releases – in fact, with 247 bottles, it’s actually larger than the maximum current size of the Discovery Club (which is capped at 180, closer to the average number of bottles we get from a single cask). So if you love this one as much as we think you will, there will be opportunities to snag an extra one down the road, and it will likely eventually become the Discovery Club signup bottle – we think it’s the perfect introduction to this new style of American whiskey.
As always, I can’t wait to hear what you think!