Discovery Club May 2025: J. Rieger & Co.
For the first release from the Lost Lantern Discovery Club, our new monthly whiskey club, we are offering our first-ever bourbon from the acclaimed J. Rieger & Co. in Kansas City, Missouri!
The Discovery Club is all about, well, discovery. At Lost Lantern, we are always fully transparent, and for the Discovery Club, we aim to dive a little deeper into our distillery partners than we’re normally able to in the context of a larger release. So we’re excited to share more about J. Rieger & Co., its whiskey, and what makes the distillery so special.
First, the whiskey: the Discovery Club release is a 5 year old single cask, distilled and aged in Missouri, and made from a high-rye mashbill. It’s bottled at a robust cask strength of 137.9 proof. It has rich oak on the nose, with hints of vanilla, leather, and clove. The palate has notes of chocolate-covered espresso beans, walnuts, baking spice, and powerful oak leading into a long, warming finish.
This release is limited to just 100 bottles and, as with all future Discovery Club releases, is exclusively available to Discovery Club members. It will start shipping to Discovery Club members automatically on May 25th. And it’s not too late to sign up! If you join by the 15th, you can still snag this inaugural release and a signup bottle as well.
Now, as the head of whiskey sourcing, I’d like to share a little bit about what makes J. Rieger & Co. special. -Adam
J. Rieger & Co.: The History
One of the things that I love about J. Rieger is that it has a real, authentic and long history, but it’s one that’s a little more complex and interesting than other revived heritage brands. In fact, it’s safe to say that Nora and I are often a little skeptical of brands whose whole story is “I revived my great grandfather’s long-forgotten whiskey brand.” But J. Rieger is different, and that isn’t their story. It not only has a more authentic and interesting origin, it has a unique perspective on what it wants to do with its whiskey, one rooted firmly not in Kentucky but in its Kansas City history.
J. Rieger & Co. is a true heritage brand, and unlike some of the revived labels that have popped up in the last few years, it was quite sizable and well-known in its original heyday. Before Prohibition, J. Rieger, then as now based in Kansas City, had a huge following for its sourced and blended whiskies. In fact, it was the largest mail-order whiskey brand in the United States. (If that sounds quaint… is it really that different from ordering whiskey online today…?).
As with so many others, the company’s alcohol business died with Prohibition. But the Rieger name remained, most notably on the city’s Rieger Hotel. And that’s where the modern incarnation of J. Rieger & Co. begins.
An Unusual Revival
In 2009, Kansas City star bartender Ryan Maybee opened a new cocktail bar, Manifesto, in the basement of the Rieger Hotel. There, he discovered the history of the Rieger family and the whiskey brand they once owned. Soon, he met Andy Rieger, the descendant of the Jacob Rieger for whom the whiskey brand is named. Together, they decided to revive the J. Rieger & Co. whiskey brand and restore it to its Kansas City home.
What I love about the story of Rieger’s rebirth is that the driving force behind it was not originally a member of the brand’s founding family. I have met Ryan Maybee a number of times, both in my earlier capacity as a journalist and now as Head of Sourcing for Lost Lantern. And I deeply respect how he fell in love with the Rieger story and was so driven by it that he brought the idea of reviving the brand to the current generation of that family. He’s a bartender whose vision and sheer force of will led him to become the cofounder of a major distillery. As an ex-journalist who had the crazy idea of starting an American independent bottler, I deeply respect this.
Let’s cut to the chase: J. Rieger & Co. officially reopened in 2014. They worked with some of the best in the business, like the late Maker’s Mark master distiller Dave Pickerell and former Tanqueray master distiller Tom Nichol, to make sure that they did everything the right way from the beginning. They started out with sourced whiskey (an important part of their program, as it was pre-Prohibition) while building out a destination distillery in Kansas City and waiting for their own whiskey to age.
That distillery now is a sight to behold: Nora and I visited when it was still under construction in 2019, and I went back to see its finished state last year. Many urban distilleries are hidden in weird industrial pockets of their cities and are functional, but not very pretty. Not J. Rieger & Co.: the distillery is not just functional (with both pot and column stills), it’s also gorgeous. The three-story building features multiple bars including a speakeasy, a museum exploring the brand’s history and legacy, a very cool room for tasting barrels, and even a slide.
Seriously, a slide. When I visited in 2019, I thought Ryan was joking about wanting to put in a slide to make it easy to get down a floor. Nope. It’s real!
As for the bars, they aren’t just your garden-variety tasting rooms: these are full-fledged cocktail bars and lounges, steeped in Rieger history and in Maybee’s background as one of the city’s leading bartenders, and they’ve made the distillery a true destination.
If you are a whiskey fan and find yourself in Kansas City, J. Rieger & Co. is a must-visit. But what about the whiskey?
J. Rieger & Co.: The Whiskey
Many distilleries in the Discovery Club will be places that are only available in one or two states. J. Rieger, on the other hand, is fairly widely available… but only for its sourced whiskey, at least for now. Their sourced and blended whiskies are excellent across the board, especially their Kansas City Whiskey… a unique whiskey which incorporates a small amount of sherry directly into the blend. Not sherry as a finish: sherry wine as an actual component, in very small proportions. It’s a nod to the distillery’s roots in Kansas City, and gives the whiskey a beautiful texture. The distillery’s highest expression is J. Rieger Monogram, an annual limited release aged in very, very old sherry barrels – like, 50 to 100 years old. We’re whiskey folks, but I should also mention that J. Rieger is tremendously dedicated to its gin program as well. If you visit, it’s all worth trying, and I’m a particular fan of the unique Caffe Amaro coffee liqueur.
From a Lost Lantern perspective, we are big fans of many sourced whiskies (after all, that’s what we do!), but when we’re sourcing ourselves, we’ll stick to a distillery’s own-make. So we were most interested in showcasing J. Rieger’s own house-distilled bourbon and rye.
J. Rieger’s releases of their own whiskey have been much more limited: their Missouri-distilled whiskies have generally only been available in Missouri and Kansas, mostly in the Kansas City area. That’s simply because it takes time to ramp up a distillery and because J. Rieger went about releasing its own whiskey the right way: they waited until everything was at least 5 years old before releasing a drop, aged in full-size barrels from the very beginning, and they’ve always clearly distinguished their sourced brands from their own-make whiskey.
And it turns out that the Kansas City area has a great climate for aging whiskey: Ryan reminded me when I last visited that the area has some of the biggest swings in temperature anywhere in the United States, and in the two days I spent in Kansas City last March, the temperature lurched from the low 80s to the high 30s in the span of about 16 hours. That’s the kind of climate that makes for great whiskey maturation, and rapid and sustained interaction between the liquid and the barrel.
To wrap things up:
Our Discovery Club release is a single cask of J. Rieger & Co.’s own straight bourbon whiskey, distilled in Missouri, and (I believe) one of the only releases of their bourbon at barrel proof to date. And at 137.9 proof, it’s a whopper, intense and full of flavor. I can’t wait to hear what you think.
The bottle will automatically ship to Discovery Club members starting May 25th.
It’s not too late to join the Discovery Club: Join by the 15th and you can still snag this bottle!