July 2026 Discovery Club: Redwood Empire California Straight Bourbon
Lost Lantern’s July Discovery Club release is a California straight bourbon from Redwood Empire. It’s our first from this acclaimed northern California distillery, which we’ve wanted to work with for several years.
This is the first release in the Discovery Club since we officially changed the cadence to every other month. Unlike the last release, United States of Bourbon Cask Strength, which was in many ways a culmination of the first year of the Discovery Club, we are now returning to the standard Discovery Club format: a cask strength, single cask whiskey from a distillery that we have never worked with before, with a cask that is available exclusively to Discovery Club members.
If you want to join the Club and start getting future releases sent to you automatically, join up here! If you’re already a member, this single cask will ship automatically starting on the 25th. Read on for more about our first cask from Redwood Empire!
Redwood Empire: The Distillery
Many of the distilleries we’ve featured in the Discovery Club are places that I first discovered by actually visiting them, often within the last year or two. Redwood Empire is a little different: we’ve known the distillery for many years, and I actually first met master distiller Jeff Duckhorn back when I was at Whisky Advocate. He visited our offices in New York and shared 3 year old samples of whiskey from the distillery, which at the time had not released anything aged and didn’t even have the Redwood Empire name yet. I thought the whiskey was wonderful, and we’ve stayed in touch with them ever since.
Nora and I visited Redwood Empire on our original Great Whiskey Road Trip, back in November 2018. At the time, the distillery was located in the small city of Graton, California, in the heart of Sonoma wine country – not the touristy part, but the part where much of the hard work of making wine actually gets done. It was quite an impressive facility, with beautiful Headframe stills, a substantial barrel inventory, and very stylish safety vests (pictured). At the time, the Redwood Empire brand was largely based on sourced whiskey while they waited for their own whiskey to reach maturity.
You may have noticed the caveat above: “At the time, the distillery was in Graton, California.” That’s because Redwood Empire has since moved. In late 2024, the company acquired a large distillery complex just outside of San Francisco, on Mare Island, previously owned by the famed winemaker Dave Phinney for his own whiskey project, Savage & Cooke. The distillery has since moved operations down to the new site, but everything they’ve released so far, and for years to come, was made at its original location in Graton. The new location, though, is much easier to visit, and a very easy jaunt from San Francisco on the way up to Napa.
Redwood Empire: The Whiskey
Redwood Empire has a wide range of whiskies, although they are tricky to find at cask strength. Our Redwood Empire Discovery Club release is a 5-year-old four-grain bourbon (71% corn, 17% rye, 7% malted barley, and 5% wheat). It was aged in a 53-gallon char 3 new American oak cask from Speyside Cooperage for 5 years. The nose has notes of lemon, apple, and vanilla spice with soft fruit and gentle oak. The palate has flavors of caramel apple, leather, and baking spice. This is our first Northern California bourbon (but not our first California bourbon, which came from Corbin Cash in the Central Valley). And it’s relatively classic, as we would expect from a distillery in the year-round temperate climate of California wine country.
As you all likely know, Lost Lantern visits every distillery before we work with them… and part of that goes beyond getting to know the whiskey and the distillery to getting to know the actual team. That was particularly easy for Redwood Empire: I’ve run into Jeff numerous times over the years, from my days at Whisky Advocate and on trips to California. But we actually know master blender Lauren Patz even better, and that’s because–in a Lost Lantern first–we’ve actually worked with her before. Before joining Redwood Empire, she was a distiller and blender at Spirit Works Distillery, also in northern California wine country, and she was one of the champions behind several of our releases… including one of our coolest whiskies ever, a sloe gin-finished rye. We’re thrilled to be working with her again now that she’s at Redwood Empire!
Redwood Empire is, along with New Holland, the most well-known and widely available distillery we’ve featured in the Discovery Club yet. Some of you likely know them already. In fact, I directly asked the folks at Redwood Empire if they thought they were already too well known for the Discovery Club. They emphatically said that they weren’t: even the most well-known distilleries Lost Lantern works with have a tiny fraction of the name recognition of heritage distilleries, and Redwood Empire is very hard to come by in cask strength single barrel form. Ultimately, we felt like this California bourbon was the perfect way to launch into year two of the now every-other-month Discovery Club, with a distillery that some may know already but many don’t and fewer have tried in this form.
Redwood Empire: The Trees
Redwood Empire is named for the belt of great redwood forests that run throughout Northern California (and once were much more widespread), the only place in the world where they naturally grow. From Redwoods National Park at the very northwest tip of California, to Humboldt County and the Avenue of the Giants, to the legendary Muir Woods just north of San Francisco, and to the sequoia trees in the Sierra Nevadas further east, the redwoods are one of the icons of northern California.
Redwood Empire is named for these trees, as are its whiskies, but it’s more than just a name. The distillery has made a serious commitment to reforestation, and to the protection of Northern California’s environmental heritage. In partnership with Trees for the Future, Redwood Empire plants a tree for every bottle of whiskey sold (approaching two million trees so far!). And it also works with Save the Redwoods League, an organization that has protected California’s redwoods for more than a century.
Nora and I love the redwoods. Neither of us are from California; it’s not even in our backyard. But we’ve spent a lot of time there, and a lot of time hiking both in coastal northern California and in the Sierra Nevadas. We fell in love with the coastal redwood forests and the sequoias on our Great Whiskey Road Trip: seeing trees that are so large creates a sense of awe that we’ve rarely experienced otherwise, even when we’ve seen other spectacular natural wonders like the Grand Canyon. There’s nothing like it. Shortly after our road trip, along with our families, Nora and I made a joint donation to the Save the Redwoods League ourselves to help them acquire one of the largest remaining unprotected tracts of redwood forest.
So as part of this Discovery Club release, Lost Lantern is making a donation to the Save the Redwoods League to further their efforts to protect these great forests, and to support Redwood Empire’s mission. I want to be very clear that this is not something that the team at Redwood Empire asked us to do. It was my idea, and important to me that for our first release with them, we showed that we are also aligned with the same values of protecting the great redwood forests.
The Lost Lantern July Discovery Club release will start shipping to members on July 25th, and we can’t wait to see what you all think!