Canadian Club Classic 12 Year Old

A lovechild of Scotch and Bourbon.

The first thing you need to know about Canadian Club is that it wasn’t even invented in Canada. Sure, it’s made there now, and that is an interesting story indeed. You see, the Whisky that would come to be known as Canadian Club was invented by a small distilling company called Gooderham and Worts from Detroit, all the way back in 1858. Hiram Walker was living nearby, making cider Whisky in the back of his grocery store and saw the potential, so the two companies merged with Walker as “the Man.”

When the dark times of Prohibition arrived, Walker picked up the entire operation and moved it across the lake, conveniently just across the Canadian border and changed the product’s name to what it is now. He even built an entire town called Walkerville, so that his employees could live near the new plant. If you are new to Canadian Club Whisky, think of it as a delicious love child between Scotch and Bourbon. Like Bourbon, it is a mix of grains with a high corn mash. Like Scotch, it adds a lot of barley. But what makes it a bit different is that they also use malted and unmalted Rye. This makes Canadian Club a bit fuller and more grain forward than Bourbon.

Canadian Club Classic 12 is… well, it’s their classic Whisky produced in smaller batches and aged for, you guessed it, 12 years. See? Whisky doesn’t HAVE to be complicated. Sometimes the simplest things are best.