Discovery Club January 2026: Pine Bluffs

Sometimes I read about a distillery and I get so excited about it that I go a long, long way to get there.

Literally and metaphorically, that’s what I did when I visited the distillery for the January 2026 Discovery Club release. I’m guessing it’s a distillery you haven’t heard of. I hadn’t, until I started researching distilleries in that area. I’m quite sure you haven’t tried it, unless you’re from their neck of the woods. I drove almost 7 hours from Omaha across all of Nebraska to get there.  

But oh man. You need to know this place. And now you will. And someday, many whiskey lovers all across the country will know them as well.

The January Discovery Club release comes from Pine Bluffs Distilling in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming (right on the state’s eastern edge). It’s a 5 year old straight bourbon whiskey made entirely from grain grown in their immediate vicinity.  

It is very different from our first Wyoming bourbon, which came from the wonderful Backwards Distilling just outside Casper (and credit where credit’s due: Amber, the cofounder of Backwards, is the one who told me I should make it to Pine Bluffs). This bourbon is softer, earthier, less oak forward. It’s a whiskey that tastes like the land. And that’s exactly what it’s going for.

Pine Bluffs Distillery: The Story

Think back to the Summer 2025 Lost Lantern Estate Collection, focused on estate distilleries that grow all their own grain themselves. 

The common theme behind all four distilleries in the collection, beyond their commitment to growing their own grain and reflecting a sense of place, is that they were all based on century-old family farms. 

Now ask yourself… what if you believed in every aspect of the ethos behind estate distilleries… but you didn’t happen to be a 4th or 5th or 6th generation farmer with a century-old family farm?

Pine Bluffs answers that question.

You’d start your distillery out in farm country. You’d work with the local farmers who are already there, ask them to grow the grain you want, pay them a lot more than they get from growing commodity grain, and bring the grain right to the distillery. And then you’d make it into whiskey that truly reflects a sense of place. 

Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, like Fallon, Nevada (home of Frey Ranch) and Atwater, California (home of Corbin Cash) is a little off the beaten path, but not so much so that you can never get there. I happened to visit from Omaha, a six hour drive east, but it’s only 45 minutes from Cheyenne (Wyoming’s capital and largest city) and two hours to Denver. But this is truly farm country. The ranchlands and mesas of western Nebraska turned back into grain country when I got close to the border. 

And the distillery itself is surrounded by farm fields. In fact, that was the idea all along.

Chad Brown, the cofounder of Pine Bluffs Distilling, moved to Pine Bluffs after a successful career in Vegas to work on his cousin’s farm. And that’s where the idea for the distillery was born: a place to make the region’s natural bounty into something truly distinctive, and one that could help support the area’s farmers. 

From its beginning in 2017, the distillery has worked very closely with local farmers, and that’s part of why it plays with a wide variety of mashbills: it will take and distill what local farmers grow. That’s why, in addition to bourbon and rye, they are one of the only distilleries in the country to make an oat whiskey. 

But we figured the best way to introduce the distillery is through their bourbon. Enter the Discovery Club single cask.

Pine Bluffs: The Discovery Club Cask

The Lost Lantern Discovery Club cask for January 2026 is a 5 year old straight bourbon whiskey single cask from Pine Bluffs. Made from 60% locally grown corn, 20% malted white wheat, and 20% malted barley, it has many of the classic hallmarks of a wheated bourbon. Imagine that you were holding a loaf of fresh bread in the midst of a forest in summer: that’s what this whiskey tastes like to me. It’s warm, soft, approachable, and slightly earthy (like many estate-grown whiskies, although less so than Frey Ranch or Far North).

The climate in Wyoming had a big impact on this whiskey. We are big fans of whiskies coming from the Great Plains, and Pine Bluffs is on their western edge (much as Cedar Ridge is on the eastern edge). But the climate is a little more extreme here, with long, cold, windy winters and short, yet hot, summers. The result is an exquisitely balanced whiskey. 

Pine Bluffs is not widely known yet. But I think they will be someday, and should be spoken of in the same breath as many of the other western distilleries we have come to love. And I intend to do our very best to bring them as much attention as I can, because whiskey lovers really should know about this place and start keeping an eye on it. And hey… it’s a day trip from Denver. 

I am truly excited to be able to share this whiskey with the Discovery Club, and I can’t wait to see what you all think of it!