When Raj Peter Bhakta founded WhistlePig in 2007, American rye whiskey was considered little more than an inexpensive cocktail base that worked well in spirit-forward cocktails. When he parted ways with WhistlePig 11 years later, he was widely credited with having ignited a rye whiskey renaissance, with bottles of WhistlePig’s highly allocated Boss Hog expression trading for thousands of dollars on the secondary market. Never mind that Bhakta’s departure from WhistlePig was neither voluntary nor amicable (he was forcibly bought out by his investors). Bhakta had a vision, a flair for splashy promotion and a solid product that — when given the right push — redefined rye whiskey as a premium sipping spirit.
In the years since his departure, Bhakta hasn’t lost his enthusiasm for spirits, his penchant for playful self-promotion or his disdain for the status quo. Tapping the generous proceeds from his WhistlePig divestment, he acquired a chateau in France’s Armagnac region along with its vast trove of rare aged Armagnac. He’s launched Bhakta Spirits, an independent spirits brand that sells those vintage Armagnacs alongside other vintage-dated spirits. He even rehabilitated a small, defunct college campus in tiny Poultney, Vermont, into a headquarters for his spirits industry ambitions.
If his latest project is any indication, Bhakta isn’t yet done creating category-defining spirits — or with pigs, for that matter. Under the brand name Hogsworth, Bhakta has merged two of his loves in an unconventional genre-bending blend of American bourbon and French Armagnac that is, according to Bhakta, “the single greatest bottle you’ll find, unmatched at even 10 times the price.” At less than $50 per bottle, it should sit on a competitive part of the retail shelf (although it’s not entirely clear which shelf this not-entirely-whiskey should reside on).
[Hogsworth is] the single greatest bottle you’ll find, unmatched at even 10 times the price.
Raj Peter Bhakta, on his new $50 Hogsworth blend of bourbon and Armagnac
And the decidedly porcine name? Bhakta insists the Hogsworth brand is in no way a callback to — or underhanded swipe at — his former company (which, it should be noted, sits just up the road from Bhakta’s Vermont residence and bottling facilities). “I’ve had a great deal of fun and success with pigs,” he says. “This isn’t like a ‘fuck you’ or some revenge play or anything like that. I remain fond of pigs and don’t think my work with them is complete. It really is that simple.”
The name notwithstanding, if Bhakta did conceive Hogsworth as a means to compete directly with his old company, he’s gone about it in a highly unconventional way. The blending of two disparate spirits into a single product is certainly not unheard of, but it’s also far from common. Products like Rum and Rye from Star Union Spirits and Fortuitous Union from Rolling Forks Spirits combine rum and American whiskey in the same bottle, for instance. Bhakta Spirits’ own 1928 — a majority rye whiskey blended with smaller volumes of Calvados and vintage Armagnacs — provides something of a blueprint for the Hogsworth model.
But those products are typically small, highly-limited releases within much larger portfolios, interesting one-offs rather than core, flagship products. With Hogsworth, Bhakta aims to build an entire brand around the idea that two types of spirits are better than one.
“It kind of sets him up to dominate the category,” says Blake Riber, founder of specialty craft spirits purveyor Seelbach’s. “If he does this and it is successful, if anyone else wants to talk about blending spirits, they’re going to talk about Hogsworth.”
The Hogsworth liquid rolling out to consumers this month — a blend of two four-year-old American bourbons and three Armagnacs (from vintages 1982, 2010 and 2012) — will remain the core product for the Hogsworth brand, which will exist adjacent to but separate from Bhakta Spirits, which remains focused on vintage bottlings. Rolling out in limited quantities this month, this flagship Hogsworth liquid will eventually be available year-round on a batch-by-batch basis at a very reasonable $50 MSRP.
Relative to bourbon, Bhakta says, Hogsworth offers a familiar but arguably more complex flavor profile, something that drinks well neat or in a cocktail. It also provides great comparative value. So while some might see Hogsworth as a passive-aggressive middle finger to his former company, Bhakta sees Hogsworth as more a shot across the bow of the lethargic, uninspired bourbon industry.
“I think a lot of the [bourbon] brands take themselves way too seriously,” he says. “Ninety percent of the spirits in the bourbon aisle are coming from two or three distributors. You’ve got 500 brands, but it’s all coming from four or five places. The prices are high, it’s boring as shit, it’s joyless. Here, we have a legitimately unique product where we’re delivering extraordinary flavor, extraordinary complexity, extraordinary innovation and a profile no one’s tasted before.”
Raj Bhakta Wants You to Love Armagnac (and Find Spiritual Fulfillment)
Years after founding WhistlePig, the brash drinks entrepreneur has found spiritual fulfillment in an ancient but little-known brandyIf no one has tasted anything like Hogsworth before, it’s because most spirits lovers wouldn’t consider diluting a perfectly good vintage Armagnac — much less several vintage Armagnacs — with a perfectly good bourbon (or vice versa). But contrarian thinking and savvy marketing previously propelled Bhakta to the fore of the rye whiskey revival, and he’s betting he can likewise convince consumers to join him in rethinking the “how” and “why” of spirits blending.
“With Bhakta, we’re still trying to get out of this box of limits and regulations and class and type and all this stuff,” says Pete Lynch, master blender for Bhakta Spirits and Hogsworth. “We are effectively saying: ‘Why not just make something that tastes amazing?’”
Lynch served as the master blender at WhistlePig during Bhakta’s final few years with his former company and reunited with his former boss last year when he came aboard as Bhakta Spirits’ master blender and production manager. Lynch is well-versed in the Raj Bhakta school of product development, so when Bhakta told him to “give me a bourbon-forward blend that contains a goodly amount of Armagnac so we can benefit from these two iconic spirits categories, one big and American, the other elegant, ancient and French” (Bhakta’s words), Lynch wasn’t fazed in the least.
“On a face value level, bourbons and Armagnacs blend quite well together,” Lynch says, noting that the heavier, new-oak cask influence on a young bourbon meshes well with the crisper, fruitier, more elegant flavor notes found in moderately aged Armagnac. “But you really need to mess around with these things because who has blended together anything like this before?”
Many months of messing around led Lynch to a final recipe (known as Blend #9), consisting of 52% bourbon and 48% Armagnac, including bourbons from both Tennessee and Minnesota — both four years old — and vintage Armagnacs dated 2012, 2010 and 1982. In the glass, this first batch of Hogsworth presents a bit of a puzzle, at least at first. It hits the nose as a bourbon, exhibiting classic notes of honey, vanilla, baking spice and scorched sugar. On the palate, however, it shape-shifts, starting spicy and sweet before unspooling lighter, fruitier hallmarks of Armagnac like orange zest, apple and dried apricot.
Bhakta is betting that bourbon drinkers will appreciate the additional dimension that Hogsworth brings to its whiskey, particularly at its $50 price point. But launching and maintaining a product like Hogsworth comes with its own unique set of challenges. For one, whiskey traditionalists may not understand — or care to understand — what a bourbon/Armagnac blend brings to the table. While Bhakta and Lynch speak of Hogsworth as a bourbon first and foremost — albeit one augmented with fine French brandy — U.S. labeling law doesn’t classify such a blend as a “bourbon” but rather as a “distilled spirits specialty,” an esoteric distinction that may nonetheless breed confusion as to where Hogsworth lands on retail shelves and back bars.
Incorporating vintage Armagnac into the blend of a core product also creates headaches on the production side, as there’s only so much of each vintage on hand and no way to rush-deliver more. “Will this blend get a little younger over time?” Bhakta says. “Maybe. Probably. But we’ll be able to consistently ramp up production every year. The Armagnacs that we’re using are finite, they’re rare. There’s literally more bourbon laid down in 10 minutes in America than they produce in Armagnac in a year. So we’re gonna run into supply issues with keeping the Armagnac in there, there’s no two ways about it.”
But there’s little sense in worrying about supply issues until demand becomes a problem, and right now the demand for bourbon/Armagnac blends hovers somewhere around zero. “The biggest hurdle when you’re releasing a new product is getting attention to it,” Riber says. “But Raj has always been extremely good at that.”
As Hogsworth rolls out via conventional sales channels in the months ahead, expect a characteristically theatrical and splashy marketing push. (For example, when drumming up interest during WhistlePig’s formative days, Bhakta would routinely show up in unlikely places trailing two leashed pigs.) But the majority of Hogsworth Batch 1 will retail via e-commerce, a strategy that may seem counterintuitive but one that Bhakta believes will get roughly 5,000 bottles of this initial limited run into the hands of curious spirits lovers who bother to seek it out. And because Bhakta loves a good collectible — the highly allocated Boss Hog series he created at WhistlePig continues to send collectors into a frenzy each time a new bottle drops — each bottle of Hogsworth Batch 1 will sport one of nine different labels, each never to be seen again. A larger run of Hogsworth Batch 2 will follow in additional retail channels in early 2025, presumably with a more permanent branding schema.
Riber, whose company specializes in selling rare and often under-the-radar craft spirits, is intimately familiar with the perils of bringing a new and virtually unknown spirit to market. But having witnessed Bhakta reshape the rye whiskey category with WhistlePig, he believes Hogsworth could ultimately find an enthusiastic audience. As a product, it has all the right components in the blend.
“It arouses curiosity, there’s a little bit of drama with the name and it’s like $50, which opens it up to a much larger pool of consumers,” Riber says. “I wouldn’t be shocked at all if it does really well.”
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