Introducing Garryana Edition 10

Over the last decade, we’ve traced the elements that define our corner of the world. We’ve closely examined the barley bred in coastal valleys, the peat that holds the memory of forests long gone, the Garry oak that refuses to be domesticated, and the people who’ve shaped this landscape; each of these things working together to inform how we create our whiskeys. Each story has been a fragment of a larger portrait, acting as a way of understanding how Westland became what it is today. And now, on the eve of our tenth Garryana release, those threads gather into focus.

For over a decade, our journey with Garryana oak has been a study in patience and possibility. Each release was a new chapter in a long experiment. Each cask a question posed to our environment and an invitation for the Pacific Northwest to answer in its own voice.

We asked what happens when barley, yeast, and oak, three simple ingredients, are allowed to speak of a place as singular as ours. We learned early that Garryana, the rare and resilient oak native to this region, produced flavors we had never seen before in any of our other whiskeys. Its personality was untamed and unscripted: spicy, savory, fierce, and tannic. To understand it, we had to test it and uncover its layers. Each release we decided to hold it up against other forces of flavor and time.

Over the years, we’ve pursued contrast as a form of understanding. Our Master Blender Shane took the Garryana Edition 1 release as his own solo project. Each release has then shown the timeline of his journey uncovering flavors of Garryana oak. Shane has, in previous Garryana expressions, layered peated malt into the fold, seeing a beautiful harmony of savory tannin and balanced smoke. We filled sherry casks and matched their richness with the complex spice of Garryana oak casks. We’ve explored re-filled garryana oak casks, rum casks, brandy, and all kinds of different barley malts in the Garryana whiskey recipe. Each expression kind of like a tintype portrait, seeing into a specific place and time, slowly uncovering the subject of Garryana oak in frame.

Each experiment was a calibration. Some releases leaned into the savory, others the sweet, each a waypoint on the long road toward comprehension. We never sought to repeat ourselves, but rather to listen closely enough that the next step revealed itself.

Now, ten years on the path, we arrive at a rare kind of reflection.
Garryana Edition 10 is not a finale, but a specific vantage point. We wanted to take a chance to look back on the path that brought us here and forward to where we might go next. Garryana Edition 10, aged 10 years, carries the genetics of every edition before it: the ambition of the first, the refinement of the middle, and the confidence of a distillery that has grown alongside its oak.

Our stocks have multiplied since those early days, from a few hundred casks aging near the misty Pacific Coast to a thriving collection that spans the agricultural enclaves of Washington’s Skagit County. Through it all, Garryana remained its own compass point, the unyielding center around which our curiosity orbited.

And so, we return to the oak that changed everything.

Garryana Edition 10 is built from 33 casks, each a vessel of its own story, brought together in deliberate harmony. The vatting includes 42 percent Five Malt and 58 percent Pale malt, the latter drawn from Washington-grown varietals like Copeland, 2-Row Distiller’s Malt, and Pilsen. Around 84 percent of this spirit was finished for an average of five years, with remnants of Editions 1 and 2 still alive within the blend—threads of history woven into the present.

On the nose, it opens with mulled wine and clove, deepened by walnut fudge notes and the bright lift of lemon Danish pastry. The palate moves between campfire warmth and orchard brightness: s’mores, dehydrated strawberry, toasted cumin seed, and a flicker of blood orange. It’s the Pacific Northwest in a glass, a whiskey that mirrors the place it comes from.

On this particular release, our Master Blender Shane remarks, “Garryana 10 is more accumulation than culmination; a portrait revisited until it resembles itself, then starting over.” That sentiment captures the spirit of the past ten years. We didn’t wait for perfection, we built it. Piece by piece, one cask at a time, through trial, time, and trust that we had found something very special here.

Each cask, each year, each edition has taught us something new about what it means to make whiskey of this place. And so, while Edition 10 marks a milestone, it also reaffirms a truth that’s guided us since the beginning: that whiskey, like the landscape it reflects, is never finished.

Tomorrow, the decade turns over. We’ve been in business for 15 years and now we release our first age-stated whiskey. Garryana was the perfect series to beckon the call. The doors of the distillery will open, glasses will be raised, and the first pours of Garryana Edition 10 will mark not our next step forward.

This whiskey, like all of the others, a product of oak and time. But looking deeper, it is also the story of a region, a distillery, and a team learning to listen to the land. The first ten years were about discovery. The next ten will be about deepening that connection. And so we go, ever forward.