Discovery Club June 2025: Baltimore Spirits

I’m very excited to announce this month’s Discovery Club release: a 4-year-old Maryland Straight Rye Whiskey from Baltimore Spirits Co. in Baltimore, Maryland! 

First, as a reminder: The Lost Lantern Discovery Club is our new monthly whiskey club, focused on whiskies from great rising star distilleries all across the United States! Members automatically receive an exclusive new single cask whiskey bottling every month, and also get a number of other perks, including early access to other Lost Lantern releases. It’s not too late to sign up for the June shipment, and get your hands both on this Baltimore Spirits cask and to get early access to our upcoming Summer Collection! Join now!

This is the first time we’ve partnered with Baltimore Spirits Co., and it’s also the first whiskey we’ve ever released from the state of Maryland. And, if you know much about American spirits history, it should be no surprise at all that our first Maryland whiskey is a rye.

Maryland Rye  

Maryland rye is one of the oldest styles of whiskey in the United States – arguably the oldest (the main competition is Pennsylvania rye), dating back to colonial times. The state was a leading rye whiskey producer all the way up through Prohibition.

You may be wondering what exactly made Maryland-style rye a distinctive whisky style. This is, in fact, the million-dollar question: as reported by the New York Times, nobody quite knows. Unlike Pennsylvania rye, which only died out in the 1990s, Maryland rye was dead and gone for the better part of a hundred years before a new wave of distilleries began reviving it. There are simply fewer records, with less specific documentation, and much of the evidence comes from century-old advertising puffery about how Maryland rye was sweeter and less rough than other types of rye. So distilleries today that are reviving Maryland rye often have fairly different interpretations of what that actually means.  

But there’s one thing we are pretty sure about (he says, somewhat facetiously): one very distinctive feature of Maryland rye, back in the day, is that it was made in Maryland.     

And now it is again.

Baltimore Spirits and the Rye Revival

Baltimore Spirits was born to create great rye whiskey (and other things) in Maryland once again, and to revive the long tradition of distilling in Baltimore itself. 

The three founders–Ian Newton, Max Lents, and Eli Breitburg-Smith–don’t get too hung up on what Maryland rye used to be, what made it distinctive a hundred years ago. They are more interested in bringing that rye history back to its cultural home in Baltimore, and to making Maryland rye into something distinct and unique in the here and now. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: they definitely care about the tradition, and know a lot about it. It was very important to them that they make their Maryland rye whiskey on a pot still, which they do, since that was the only kind of still that was around in Maryland’s earliest distilling days. And it was important for them to do everything on site, from fermentation to distillation to aging. They’ve never sourced any whiskey and have no reason to: their goal is to showcase a Maryland rye, made in Maryland, and sourcing would defeat the point of that. 

The distillery is best known for their flagship Epoch rye whiskey, a 100% rye whiskey. That is a divergence from the usual interpretation that Maryland rye was high in corn; with 0% corn, it’s safe to say that Epoch rye is not a high-corn rye. But the history, as I mentioned, is complicated. 

If you want to dive deeper into the history of Maryland rye, watch this video from the folks at Baltimore! 

How We Found Baltimore Spirits: They Found Us 

People always ask us how we choose distilleries to be Lost Lantern partners. Usually, it’s because I know of them already, or come across them in my research before I visit a state, or hear about them through word-of-mouth. Every once in a while, it’s something more unusual, and that was the case for Baltimore Spirits.

I first came across Baltimore Spirits when I met co-founder and head distiller Eli Breitburg-Smith at the American Craft Spirits Association conference a few years ago. And that’s because he sought me out. He knew what we were up to at Lost Lantern, and wanted to tell me about Baltimore Spirits and encourage me to come visit them. And I thought everything he was saying sounded pretty cool – reviving Maryland rye? Doing it right in Baltimore? It piqued my interest. That is not always the case: we talk to many distilleries that don’t end up being a fit for us, for any number of reasons. But the conversation with Eli was interesting enough that it put them on our radar. I promised I would visit next time I was in the D.C. area.

Of course, that ended up being like two years later. I hadn’t expected that part. The self-imposed but very firm rule that we have to visit every distillery we work with, before we work with them, does slow us down sometimes, but it’s so important. Visiting a distillery is the best way to really understand it, and what the team there is trying to do.

The upside to taking forever to get down to visit Baltimore was that in the meantime, I did actually come across their whiskey. I saw it at the Whiskey Vault at the Wizard Academy, immediately wrangled myself a pour, and was very pleased. It was a good reminder that I needed to actually make time to get to Baltimore, sooner rather than later. 

I finally made it down to D.C. last September, and added on a day to visit Baltimore and get to Baltimore Spirits. I’m very glad I did: the team is great and incredibly knowledgeable, the distillery is immaculate, the tasting room is gorgeous, and most importantly, the whiskey is extremely good. 

I am sad to say I didn’t get to spend a ton of time in Baltimore: most of my trip was oriented around going to D.C. for an event with the American Craft Spirits Association, so it was a quick trip and I didn’t have time to tour the city. I did find time to get myself a pit beef sandwich–a local specialty I first learned about from The Wire. (It’s literally impossible to write a post about Baltimore and not mention The Wire – I tried and the document refused to save or upload until I included it). I confirmed with Max and Eli first that this was actually something Baltimoreans ate, and not just something for tourists. So with their blessing, I ended up at the famous Chaps Pit Beef. Gotta be a little adventurous when I’m on the road, right?

An Adventurous Spirit

But back to the distillery: When I visited Baltimore Spirits, one of the first things that jumped out at me was how adventurous they are. Yes, this is a distillery that is deeply committed to making wonderful whiskey. And they also make a whole array of other things, ones that push the boundaries of flavors in spirits. We may be a whiskey-focused independent bottler, but that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy other spirits as well. 

Nora and I have been big fans of amaro, Italian bitter liqueurs, since before it was cool (okay, that was a very hipster thing to say, but it’s true!). So we’ve been thrilled to see the emergence of new American-style amari. Some of these seek to loosely replicate the flavors of the amazing Italian amari that have become widely known. Others try to do something entirely new, to create a distinctively American style of amaro. Baltimore Spirits does both with its Baltamaro range. One is a classic Fernet, made in a fairly traditional style but aged in used rye barrels for a local touch. Some of the other expressions, on the other hand, are wildly different than anything I’ve seen before, and both pay homage to Baltimore’s rich and diverse cultural heritage. Their Szechuan amaro, made using Szechuan peppercorns, adds a unique tongue-numbing but not spicy element to this traditional aperitif. And their coffee amaro emphasizes dark and earthy overtones while adding complexity.

I also want to give a nod to Baltimore’s apple brandy – a spirit that also has a strong claim to be the first type of spirit made in what’s now the U.S. But one thing that definitely does not date back to colonial times is their mezcal-style smoked apple brandy, or their once-a-year release of mezcal-style smoked apple brandy pechuga, distilled with a Maryland country ham inside the still. No, those spirits bring together multiple historic distilling traditions that have never been combined before, and the result is both supremely cool and quite delicious. But no, you won’t be seeing one of these wilder spirits in the Lost Lantern Discovery Club anytime soon: We’re sticking to whiskey. But you should check out Baltimore Spirits and explore them for yourself.  

The Discovery Club Release

Now on to our release. We are choosing to shine a light on Baltimore Spirits both because their whiskies are wonderful and because they are reviving and re-popularizing a historic style in a part of the country with a truly lost distilling tradition. 

Our Discovery Club release for June 2025 is a Maryland straight rye whiskey made from 75% rye and 25% malted rye (one of our favorite grains!). Aged for 4 years in a 53 gallon new American oak Independent Stave Co. cask, char 2, it was bottled at its natural cask strength of 118.7 proof. It is grassy with notes of dried lemon on the nose. The palate is hearty and full-bodied, with hints of warm rye spice, rich old oak, and leatherbound books. Overall, this is a savory and flinty whiskey, complex yet with balanced sweetness and spice.

Baltimore Spirits was founded in 2015, so they’re celebrating their tenth anniversary this year – and we find that ten year anniversary is often right around the sweet spot for a young distillery, when they start to emerge into their prime. So it’s no surprise that Baltimore and their Epoch rye have started to gain some national recognition, most notably making it onto whiskey influencer Fred Minnick’s Top 100 list of 2024. It will be just one of many more recognitions to come. The one downside is that, for now, it’s fairly hard to find Epoch rye outside of the Maryland and D.C. area. That will likely change over time… but for now, that’s what  the Discovery Club is for!

I hope you enjoy the Lost Lantern June 2025 Discovery Club release for June 2025, and what is probably your first taste of Baltimore Spirits! I can’t wait to hear what you all think!