In 2023 country singer Eric Church and Ari Sussman unveiled Whiskey Jypsi Legacy Batch 001. Two autumns later, in 2025, they released Legacy Batch 003, titled “The Declaration.” Shelves today brim with excellent blends of sourced whiskey, yet few bottles carry a tale that truly outlives the pour. Sussman sets aside the usual crown of master blender and simply calls himself a whiskey maker, insisting the liquid and the legend must stand equal. Every creation he shapes begins with a purpose that reaches far beyond the glass.

The third Legacy release landed the same year the nation marked the 250th anniversary of the Continental Army on June 14, 2025, and it is built as a deliberate tribute to the fire of rebellion. George Washington rightfully commands center stage in every telling of independence, but home-grown grain spirits — distilled from American soil by American hands — served as a quieter, everyday banner of defiance. The familiar refrain that bourbon is “America’s native spirit” rings loud, and Congress did indeed declare it a distinctive product of the United States in 1964, yet bourbon never held the first place in colonial affection. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rum reigned unchallenged as the spirit of empire and the colonists’ earliest passion in strong drink.

Before the Revolution, colonists bowed to the king and lifted their cups to rum. From the late 1600s through the opening decades of the republic, with its crest in the mid-1700s, rum was everywhere. New England alone counted more than sixty stills by the 1760s, churning out millions of gallons a year from cheap Caribbean molasses. The spirit fueled the grim Triangle Trade, crossed every table from dockside tavern to planter’s parlor, and because local water often carried sickness, a mug of rum punch was judged safer than the well itself. Ministers took part of their pay in rum, courts settled fines in rum, and rum sometimes served as coin when silver was scarce. Flips, toddies, and punches flowed at elections, militia drills, weddings, and funerals. Soldiers and sailors received a daily gill as standard issue.

Britain first encouraged the trade, then grew uneasy. The Molasses Act of 1733 slapped a crushing duty on non-British molasses — high enough to kill the industry if enforced. Colonists answered with open smuggling and generous bribes; the law became a standing joke. When Parliament tried again in 1764 with the Sugar Act — lower duty but serious collection — fury swept the ports. Patriots boycotted rum made from British-island molasses; taverns advertised “Liberty rum” distilled from smuggled French stock. Loyalists, often wealthier and tied to official trade, kept ordering legal imports as a quiet show of allegiance. In the years just before and during the war, rum drinking waned while grain distillation surged. Stills in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia suddenly found eager buyers for spirits that owed nothing to London or the Caribbean. Rum, once the drink of empire, became the drink of the enemy; whiskey, rough-hewn and local, became the drink of rebellion.

George Washington himself ran one of the largest distilleries in the young nation. Built at Mount Vernon in 1797 after his presidency, the Dogue Run works produced nearly 11,000 gallons in 1799 alone, mostly rye whiskey from a mash of roughly 60% rye, 35% corn, and 5% percent malted barley — a general recipe common along the Maryland-Virginia line. Apple and peach brandy also came from his stills (fruit brandies were prized and costly in taverns of the era), yet rye remained the mainstay, mirroring the post-war pivot to grain. The oldest registered distillery in the United States belongs to Laird & Company in New Jersey; founded in 1780 and still holding Treasury License No. 1, it has always made apple brandy — reminding us that, in Revolutionary times, applejack often outranked and outpriced whiskey itself. The Mount Vernon buildings later crumbled, but in 2007 the site rose again from archaeological evidence and period ledgers; it still turns out small runs using eighteenth-century methods.

Ari Sussman took that historic grain bill as his guiding star, adjusting it to 60% rye, 30% corn, and 10% malted barley for a re-imagined Maryland-style rye. He drew from three deliberate currents: high-rye stock from MGP in Indiana, aged 8-12 years and finished in apple brandy barrels filled and emptied at the reborn Mount Vernon distillery; pure corn whisky from Alberta, rested twenty to twenty-five years with its final stretch in new charred American oak from West Virginia Great Barrel Co.; and 8-year-old American single malt from Virginia Distillery Company, run through Scottish-built pot stills — a quiet salute to the Scots who carried distilling knowledge to Virginia soil centuries earlier. When married, the three components settle at the target sixty-thirty-ten ratio, honoring Washington’s ledger while remaining wholly contemporary.

The bottling strength — 115.74 proof — is no accident of the barrel. It is a whispered tribute to November 5, 1774 (11-5-74), the day a rough assembly of backcountry South Carolina settlers gathered at Fort Gower near Camden. Mostly Scots-Irish and German farmers who had pushed inland along the Wateree and Congaree rivers, they elected planter Richard Richardson as chairman and hammered out a set of resolves that stunned the colonies. They denounced Parliament’s claim to tax without consent, branded the Intolerable Acts oppressive and dangerous, pledged full support for the Continental Congress, vowed to halt all trade with Britain until the acts were repealed, and — most startling in the autumn of 1774 — declared they would arm, train, and stand ready for whatever came next, even if it meant total separation from the mother country. Word of the Camden Resolves raced up the post road, reached Charleston within days, and appeared in newspapers from Savannah to Boston within weeks. Northern radicals hailed it as proof the frontier was aflame; British officials muttered about treason in the pines. Nearly two years before Jefferson’s polished parchment in Philadelphia, ordinary settlers in the Carolina backcountry had already drawn their line in the red clay and dared the empire to cross it. Historians still call the Camden Resolves the “little Declaration of Independence.”

Blended whiskey still carries old baggage in American circles, too often remembered as neutral spirit stretched with a whisper of the real thing. Sussman and a growing band of makers are determined to redeem the category, proving a blend can be proud, thoughtful, and rich with meaning. With Legacy Batch 003 “The Declaration,” history, geography, and deliberate craft converge in a single bottle that stands as both spirit and living reminder of the original American refusal to kneel.

With so much purpose poured into every choice that shaped this whiskey, how does the finished glass measure against the weight of its story? Does the liquid itself carry the same fire its maker intended?

Whiskey Jypsi Legacy Batch 003: The Declaration Review

On the nose, the first thing that hits are stewed apples cooked down with brown sugar and a dusting of cinnamon — exactly what you’d expect from barrels that once held Mount Vernon apple brandy. Then, without warning, the air shifts. A sharp, green whiff of a brand-new can of tennis balls punches through, followed by the smell of sun-heated canvas, the fabric sometimes used to fashion camping tents.  Those two scents are peculiar  for a rye-heavy blend, yet meshing with the fruit and somehow making perfect sense. The bouquet refuses to behave like any other whiskey on the shelf in the best of ways.

On the tongue it opens with the character of a Cadbury Creme Egg — silky, sweet vanilla cream wrapped in milk chocolate — before a bitter snap of hoppy IPA pushes in and pulls everything toward black licorice. The texture starts thick and custard-like, then snaps dry. The close brings golden sultanas, marshmallows pulled straight from the edge of a campfire, the mint-laden chocolate of an Andes Mint, and a stripe of cinnamon chewing gum that refuses to leave. Nothing clashes, nothing apologizes. Every turn is deliberate, every corner works.

At $200, the bottle will make wallets hesitate, but the liquid inside earns its keep. It is not another mundane sourced whiskey produced by a celebrity; it is a declaration in glass. Ari Sussman set out to prove that “blended” can stand tall in America. Whiskey Jypsi and Sussman have declared independence the common American understanding of blended whiskey… and we’re better off for it.

115.74 proof.

A / $200

The post Review: Whiskey Jypsi Legacy Batch 003: The Declaration appeared first on Drinkhacker: The Insider's Guide to Good Drinking.