Located on a retail strip, across from a Comfort Suites, New Riff inspired a double-take as I approached. It’s a sleek building of glass, steel and stonework with a 60-foot-tall copper still enclosed in a glass tower. It shares a parking lot with Party Source, one of the largest liquor stores in the U.S., which was founded by Ken Lewis in 1993. In 2014, Mr. Lewis built the distillery and co-founded the business with Jay Erisman, his fine-spirits manager of 12 years, who developed the whiskeys.
New Riff’s products stand out because Mr. Erisman is quite fanatical about rye, a grain that, when included in a bourbon mash, or grain mix, lends the final spirit a peppery flex and mitigates the sweetness that comes from the corn. (Straight rye whiskey, which must be at least 51 percent rye grain by law, doubles down on the spicy black-pepper snap.)
“Part of the purpose of using rye in bourbon is to provide flavor,” Mr. Erisman said. “It can give you a powerful, spicy, intense bourbon experience, different from bourbons that are sweet, honeyed, vanilla-laden.”
We were standing in an industrial room with metal-grate floors and exposed pipes. Grain mixtures bubbled away in several of the nine 5,600-gallon steel tanks as yeast feasted on the sugars in the mix, converting it to alcohol. The feeding frenzy produces wash, essentially beer, which is then distilled into a clear spirit and sent to rest in new charred-oak casks, where the wood imbues it with all of its color and, most experts agree, a majority of its flavor.
The room looks like a factory, but the smell reminded me of a cozy bakery with sourdough loaves in the oven.
In a vast window-walled bar space, Grover Arnold, a genial brand ambassador, offered lyrical commentary as he guided me through a tasting. The whiskey offers “unique innuendoes built by the barrel,” he said. Another delivers “more love on midpalate.” A single-barrel bourbon’s peppery spice “emotes off the palate.” Its finish is “a tight hug.”
The kind of bourbons that Mr. Erisman and Mr. Arnold riff on are abundant a mile away at Prohibition Bourbon Bar, a Newport den set in a back room of a restaurant. Shelves behind the bar are packed with about 1,200 bottles of bourbon, and hundreds more occupy space on the bar and other surfaces. Still, they represent only a fraction of the 6,400 different bourbons that Peter Newberry, the owner, claims as his inventory.
