Iron City Distilling ready to release its first whiskey, in the making for 2 years

Matt Strickland knows how to time travel.

It’s a feat the 44-year-old master distiller was able to accomplish with Iron City Distilling’s Bridge Batch, a creation born from a blend between a barrel of the distillery’s 7-year-old sourced bourbon and some of its own 2-year-old stock.

Its release on Saturday, Oct. 18 marks the first whiskey made by Iron City Distilling to be sold since its opening in 2023.

Strickland began his time at Iron City as a consultant. He has had experience running distilleries on the East and West coasts, and has consulting clients in North America, South America and Europe.

He was working in Quebec when he got the call to consult on the design and start-up of Iron City Distilling in the Creighton section of East Deer. A few months later, in July 2022, he accepted an offer to run the place.

The 7-year-old sourced barrel was created by Strickland years ago and is sourced from District Distilling Co. in Washington, D.C., a distillery where Strickland used to work.

“It’s not very often … when a distiller moves to a different distillery and then sources their own whiskey,” Strickland said. “You know, if you look at the barrels, they still have my handwriting on them.”

Iron City sourced a few different kinds of whiskey from District Distilling including bourbon, wheat and a couple kinds of rye whiskey.

Sourcing whiskey is a common practice amongst distilleries.

“Whiskey distilleries — they open, and then you’re just making stuff. And then you have to sit there and wait for several years for anything to come out,” Strickland said. “Not many businesses can weather that.”

To make sure the business doesn’t go under while batches are aging, distilleries will source whiskey from another distillery, bottle it and sell it.

The Bridge Batch is produced with the last barrel of the sourced bourbon.

Strickland said the meticulous process of balancing the 7-year-old barrel and the 2-year-old Iron City barrel was a bittersweet one.

“It was a lot of fun to try and blend that together,” Strickland said. “It was also bittersweet for me because that was the last barrel from that part of my career.”

He said he named the bottle the Bridge Batch because it bridges the past to the present. And since it includes the first whiskey produced by Iron City Distilling, gives a nod to Pittsburgh as the City of Bridges.

“(The distillers) worked on the blend, making sure that the proportions of each were put in so that the best flavors mingled together. They were pretty obsessive about it,” said Peter Katz, president of Iron City Distilling.

The flavor, Strickland said, spans the two eras of the distillery.

There’s a butter corn character from the younger bourbon with a bit of tannin, he explained. There’s also a lot of sweetness and strong oak backbone in the flavor profile from the older bourbon. Strickland said drinkers will also taste notes of caramel, tobacco and vanilla.

“We wanted to have that harmonious balance of the old and the new,” Katz said.

The release is a sign of what’s to come from the distillery. Strickland attempts to put an emphasis on combining tradition with new methods to create unique flavor profiles that leave consumers feeling as though they’ve had a new experience drinking whiskey.

People will be able to purchase the bottles from the East Deer distillery’s gift shop.

Katz said the ratio yielded around 600 bottles that will be sold to the public starting Saturday, Oct. 18.

That night, the brewery will be hosting an In Good Spirits event. Folks will be able to sample Bridge Batch and other products from Iron City and other local distilleries.