The 5 Best Things We Drank This Month

Booker’s is Jim Beam Distillery’s limited run of uncut, unfiltered bourbon. Its “batches” are handpicked from the center of the rickhouse, and they come out quarterly. The latest, named after longtime distillery employee Teresa Wittemer, is a banger. It’s oily and warm, with big notes of brown sugar. We recommend it with an ice cube or two (or at least a couple drops of water).

Though someone on our team called Iichiko’s juiced-up shochu “sacrilege,” that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Shochu, which is typically in the range of 50 to 75 proof, is usually served on the rocks, with juice or as a stand-in spirit in various clear liquor cocktails. Because of the low ABV, the latter is a challenge — that’s what Iichiko Saiten was built to fix. Distilled once and kept at a much, much higher than average 43 percent ABV, this shochu makes a Japanese martini deliciously simple.

The battle to make a good low-calorie IPA has yielded a bunch of beers that taste like nothing. Dogfish Head’s new Slightly Mighty IPA, out next month, is not one of them. Instead of shirking flavor by dumping calorie-inflating ingredients like malt, the brewery opted to leaven the hops with monk fruit. The result is a slightly sweet, bone-dry IPA you could crush after a run or mowing the lawn.

Spicy, bold, aggressive — whatever you want to call them, the recipes (or mash bills) for a lot of America’s most popular ryes are exceptionally rye-forward. Michter’s new barrel strength rye is a bit more like rye used to be. It carries a bit of that rye baking spice nose and flavor, but it is made richer and more palatable by a mash bill with a lot of corn and barley.

The grain bill, comprised of 95 percent rye, is the big story when it comes to the crowd-pleasing Bulleit Rye, which has been around since 2011. This new extension of the brand takes the same base juice but jacks up the age to 12 years, imparting a kind of rounded softness you don’t get with the OG version. We get notes of caramel apple with a fair amount of baking spice. Available now.