MGP doesn’t offer tours. They don’t advertise. They don’t bottle anything themselves or put their name on anything. They distill for others, and what those other companies do once they buy their barrels -- whether they are honest about the whiskey being “sourced” from MGP or whether they obscure the fact behind a fake origin story (usually the same origin story, about someone’s grandfather moonshiner or bootlegger) and fake distillery -- has nothing to do with MGP. And yet the big Indiana outfit finds their name mentioned frequently, often times in ways that imply the whiskey they distill, by nature of being from a large industrial operation, is inferior to whiskey from a true, small craft distillery. As anyone who has tasted their way through an endless parade of young, poorly made craft products can attest, or tasted anything from MGP, this is simply not the case. After all, there’s a reason so many people bottling MGP whiskey are winning awards.

But for our purposes here, that’s neither here nor there. What is here or there is the interest that was generated when Single Cask Nation, a small independent bottler in the New York-Connecticut area, released two bottles bearing, in big black obvious letters, the name Lawrenceburg Distillers Indiana.

“Our primary aim in releasing bottles with the Lawrenceburg Distillers Indiana name on the label was to highlight the good work that this distillery is doing,” says Single Cask Nation’s Joshua Hatton. “We wanted to give credit where it was due. How other people use LDI/MGP is their business. Our business is to find good whiskey casks, educate people about the whiskey and let them know who made the stuff. Full transparency.”

Hatton, who also runs the Jewmalt website and organizes the annual Whisky Jewbilee festival, started Single Cask Nation (and its parent company, the Jewish Whisky Company) along with partners Jason Johnstone and Seth Klaskin. In no way exclusively Jewish, the Jewish Whisky Company was founded to provide education, events, and, through Single Cask Nation, actual whisky that catered to the rules and obligations of observant Judaism. Single Cask Nation is a combination of concepts: a private membership group that anyone in the US can join to gain access to the whiskies they sell, akin to Scotland’s Scotch Malt Whisky Society, and essentially an American version of something very common in Scotland - an independent bottler - someone who searches through available stocks of whiskey from a variety of sources and selects unique and exceptional casks to bottle as part of their own line. In Scotland, many single malts from independent bottlers like Gordon & MacPhail and Douglas Laing are sought out with even more passion than people searching for bottles from the distilleries themselves.