Discovery Club September 2025: Oak & Grist

Hey, everybody — I’m thrilled to announce the September Lost Lantern Discovery Club monthly release. And after a few months of bourbon and rye, we are turning at last to a much newer style of American whiskey: American Single Malt!

The September release is a 3-year-old American single malt from Oak & Grist Distillery in Black Mountain, North Carolina (just outside of Asheville). This single cask, bottled at its natural cask strength of 125.6 proof, is an unsmoked American single malt aged in used oak. It is our first release from Oak & Grist, our first release from the state of North Carolina, and the first American single malt in the Discovery Club!

Introducing Oak & Grist

Oak & Grist opened in 2015 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and founder William Goldberg has always had remarkable clarity about his vision for the distillery: he wants to make American single malt that is in line with Scottish traditions while reflecting the climate and terroir of Western North Carolina and the Appalachians. 

The distillery’s Scottish connection is real: one of the distillery’s early guiding hands was Edwin Dodson, who had been the master distiller at Glen Moray Distillery in Scotland for nearly 20 years. Although he’s now retired, Dodson’s background and role as Goldberg’s mentor has given Oak & Grist a very firm foundation in making single malt in a traditional way. 

Over the years, we have worked with many single malt distilleries that make American single malt in ways that are distinctively new, distinctively American: places like Westland with its focus on cereal grains and new oak, Whiskey Del Bac with mesquite smoke, Westward and Copperworks with the influence they display from craft brewing. Oak & Grist is not like that: it is much more traditional. 

This North Carolina distillery makes its mark not by changing how it makes its single malt, but where. The distillery makes single malt in a traditional way, but in a place where single malt was never made before, and with a real focus on sourcing local grain. All of Oak & Grist’s barley is local, grown in North Carolina and malted for the distillery at Riverbend Malt House in Asheville (surely this is one of the benefits of being right near one of the country’s largest hubs of craft brewing!).

Our History With Oak & Grist

I first visited Oak & Grist in 2022, at the tail end of a great Southern whiskey road trip that took me through Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and eventually to North Carolina. The distillery is fairly small and doesn’t make a massive amount of whiskey, and at the time their flagship blend still had a 2 year age statement (it has crept up since then). But even then, I was very excited by what I tried. And the founder William Goldberg also made quite an impression: he is young, driven, and with a clear vision not just for whiskey but for the future of sustainable local agriculture (he was once even an artisan cheesemaker!). 

I knew from that first visit that we would work with Oak & Grist at some point, and it was one of the most exciting American single malt distilleries that I had visited that didn’t already have a national reputation (at least in whiskey circles). The only surprise is that it took so long! Part of that is simply because the distillery didn’t have much whiskey to spare.

The immediate catalyst for us finally partnering with Oak & Grist was an unusual one. The Asheville area, including Black Mountain, suffered incredible damage from Hurricane Helene, which struck the area last September and caused widespread devastation. Many parts of the region lost power for weeks, and extensive flooding destroyed homes and infrastructure across the region. It was the costliest disaster in the state’s history.

Oak & Grist got lucky: it survived the hurricane, and William quickly made the distillery into a local emergency relief center. He had totes of fresh water and other emergency supplies that he gave out to local residents in the weeks after the hurricane, and the distillery played a key role in local relief efforts. And in the wake of the hurricane, once the worst was past, he reached out to us again. And it seemed like the right time.   

Oak & Grist North Carolina Single Malt: The Discovery Club Cask

Those of you who are Scotch lovers will be excited to know that Oak & Grist primarily ages its whiskies, including the Discovery Club single cask, in used oak, so the focus is really on grain and climate rather than wood. 

And the climate factor is quite an interesting one. Even in Asheville, which is in the mountains, North Carolina is quite hot and humid. And that means that whiskey matures in a different way. Oak & Grist is basically making Scottish-style American single malt but in a climate that is much more like Kentucky and Tennessee than like Scotland, although not a perfect analogue to those either. 

The result is a single malt that is young but does not taste young, and has a great deal of depth even after just 3 years in barrel. In fact, I think of its youth as a feature: this is a pure expression of grain and climate. Bottled at 125.6 proof, it is elegant, yet surprisingly powerful. It has notes of lemon meringue, honeysuckle, and autumn grass on the nose. The grassy, zesty palate has notes of lemons, apricots, and nectarines. This is warm, deep, fruity but not quite tropical. If you like Speyside Scotch, I’ll be very excited to hear what you think of this cask: it has both clear similarities and clear differences, and Speyside is clearly a touchstone for Oak & Grist. 

One last thing, and I was surprised by this myself: this is our first American Single Malt from east of the Mississippi. We have used single malts from Virginia Distillery Co. in Virginia and Triple Eight in Massachusetts in our American Vatted Malt blend before, but this is the first actual American single malt we’ve released not just from the Southeast but from the whole eastern seaboard. In fact, up until now, the furthest east we had gone for American single malt was Cedar Ridge in Iowa! The number of states we’ve released American single malt from as a whole is fairly limited, at least compared to bourbon: until now, all of our single malts came from either the West Coast, the Southwest, Colorado, Texas, or Iowa. 

So it’s very exciting to finally release a single malt from a very different part of the country, from the lush rolling hills of the Appalachians.   

I’m very excited to hear what you all think of this cask in particular. As usual, it will ship out starting on the 25th to Discovery Club members.  

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