Some road-trippers travel to see national parks or roadside attractions, but Nora Ganley-Roper and Adam Polonski planned a more spirited itinerary: On their 16,250-mile “great whiskey road trip,” the couple visited roughly 50 unique distilleries across the U.S. Along the way, the whiskey fanatics—he wrote for Whisky Advocate, while she ran the sales floor at New York City’s Astor Wines & Spirits—found a booming craft-distilling scene, but they also noticed that many small producers lacked the means to distribute nationally.
Their solution? In 2018, they founded Lost Lantern Whiskey to celebrate and distribute some of America’s best under-the-radar ryes, bourbons, and single malts. “Lost Lantern is an independent bottler, which is a phrase that may not mean much at first blush to a lot of American whiskey drinkers,” Polonski says, “but to Scotch drinkers, it tells them, in just a phrase, exactly what we’re all about.”
The partners committed to work only with distilleries they had visited personally, so that, as Polonski explains, they could “get to know the people behind the whiskey.” Lost Lantern buys experimental casks that might not otherwise be released—say, a sloe gin–finished rye from Sonoma’s Spirit Works Distillery—and also creates unique blends, often combining barrels from different distilleries. For example, a bottling called Flame brings together mesquite-smoked single malts from Arizona’s Whiskey Del Bac and New Mexico’s Santa Fe Spirits, conjuring a Southwestern-tinged answer to peated Scotches.
Crucially, the contributing distillery’s name is always prominent on the label. “What we love about the Scotch independent bottler movement is its transparency and openness,” Ganley-Roper says. “Independent bottlers don’t ever pretend they made their whiskey themselves; in fact, they proudly say that they didn’t make it.”
Those hoping to embark on their own whiskey road trip can now stop at the Lost Lantern tasting room, which opened last fall in Vermont’s smallest city, Vergennes, 40 minutes south of Burlington. Think of the themed flights here as a preview of your journey to come.
“There are well over 2,000 [distilleries across the U.S.], far more than any one person could discover on their own,” Ganley-Roper says. “That’s why the independent bottler model makes so much sense right now: There’s a whole new world of American whiskey just waiting to be discovered.”
