Malted Mummy Debuts at BrewzleFest August 29th

This is The Cut Weekend. I'm Franklin. The week ahead hasn't started yet, so let's get out in front of it while it's still quiet. Nothing's on shelves yet, nothing's sold out yet — this is the good part, when you still have a choice.

There's one date with a clock on it, and it's not this week — it's September 1st. That's when Maker's Mark Cellar Aged lands at select retailers nationwide, and this year's batch is worth circling: eighteen percent of the blend is fourteen-year-old whiskey, the oldest proportion that series has ever carried, bottled cask strength out of a house whose flagship doesn't even carry an age statement. If you want it day one, that's the date to know, not a guess. A little further out, keep an eye on August 29th — Filmland Spirits is bringing something new into the world down at BrewzleFest, and I'll walk you through it in a minute. And two things already on your radar from earlier this week are worth one line each and no more: that Commonwealth Causes raffle closes out its drawing on the 27th, and Redemption's bottled-in-bond bourbon starts its national rollout sometime in September — both still moving, neither needs repeating today.

Here's the one I want to tell you about properly. On August 29th, out at BrewzleFest, Filmland Spirits is debuting something called The Malted Mummy — and it's an odd little supply chain, in the best way. It's a five-year-old American single malt, made entirely from malted barley, which already sets it apart from the corn-heavy bourbons that dominate most shelves. Before it ever got bottled, it spent time finishing in beer barrels out of Iowa — actual brewery barrels, not whiskey wood — and the whole thing aged out in Kentucky. So you've got a malt whiskey built on a beer finish, distilled somewhere in the Midwest supply chain and matured here at home. After it launches at the festival, it's heading into nineteen states plus online, at $74.99. American single malt is still a young category figuring out its own identity, and a bottle that leans this hard into a brewery-barrel finish is exactly the kind of experiment worth tasting while it's still a novelty and not yet the norm. If you're anywhere near BrewzleFest that weekend, that's your reason to go.

So here's your week, distilled down to two moves. If you want that Cellar Aged bottle, September 1st is your day — call ahead if your store does allocation, because fourteen-year whiskey at cask strength doesn't sit on a shelf long. And if you can get to BrewzleFest on the 29th, go taste something genuinely new before the trade press catches up to it.

Now, every date I just walked you through — the Cellar Aged shelf date, the BrewzleFest debut, that raffle closing on the 27th — all of it lives in one place: the allocation calendar inside The Perfect Pour. You don't have to remember any of it. Let the app hold the dates and nudge you before a window closes, so you're never the guy showing up the day after. It's available now at theperfectpourapp.com.

That's what's on deck. If The Cut Weekend earned a few minutes of your Sunday, do me one favor — follow the show wherever you're listening, so Saturday's edition finds you on its own. The full American Whiskey Industry Brief is free every morning at chasingtheunicornpodcast.com. I'm Franklin. Pour something you like, share it with somebody worth sharing it with — and remember, your unicorn is out there.