Metallica Serves Up ‘Rye The Lightning’ Whiskey Aged By Heavy-Metal Sounds
By Mikelle Leow, 24 May 2022
Video screenshot via Blackened American Whiskey
Got a taste for Metallica? You can feel its zing on your tongue (and heart) with its newest straight rye whiskey, Rye The Lightning, which is “enhanced” by the vibrations of the 1984 Ride The Lightning album.
Metallica’s spirits, produced under its BLACKENED brand, are sonically disrupted through a proprietary ‘BLACK NOISE’ process, which blasts barrels with the band’s music. The resonance supposedly ramps up the whiskey’s interaction with the wood, rendering a more profound wood flavor.
Rye The Lightning starts with a Kentucky straight rye whiskey base that’s been aged for five to eight years. Obviously, the whiskey “listens” to Ride The Lightning while its flavors develop, but master distiller and blender Rob Dietrich kicks things up a notch by putting it through a live recording from the 2012 Orion Music + More festival—the only time the entire album was performed live.
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The idea of aging spirits with sound stems from distiller Dave Pickerell’s fascination with how a single note can cause an entire building to quiver. This led to a curiosity about how the visceral effects of a Metallica concert would affect whiskey.
Rye The Lightning—which has notes of dried fig, hay, pinewood, pear, rum cake, clover honey, mint, corn husk, sugar cane, walnut, and cinnamon—is available to preorder for US$79.99.
But if booze isn’t your thing, might we interest you in a snack? Cheez-It recently teamed up with music streaming service Pandora to launch sonically-aged cheese crackers, which are accentuated by the vibrations of hip-hop music.
[via Boing Boing and Maxim, images via Blackened American Whiskey]