Brown sugar | Maple syrup | Toasted cinnamon | Strawberry | Vanilla | New oak | Light grain

Vanilla | Brown sugar | Maple syrup

Burnt sugar | Barrel-aged maple syrup | Light smoke | Light rye spice

Opened in August 2021, Village Garage Distillery is based out of Bennington, Vermont, in a former garage for Bennington’s highway department, which was aptly nicknamed “the Village Garage.” Recent batches of the company’s Village Bourbon are now made with their in-house distillate, though their Village Bonfire is still made with sourced Vermont bourbon. To create Bonfire, the company uses local maple syrup that is smoked over maple wood at Sugar Bob’s Finest Kind in Chester, Vermont, before being combined with bourbon. Though this sounds like it would feature a flavor profile dominated by maple syrup, the company seems acutely aware of this potential pitfall and have made decisions to circumvent this.

The bourbon is, as expected, rather sweet, but surprisingly not as much as you’d expect. Maple syrup can be found through its sip, though on a close footing with the bourbon’s other major flavors of brown sugar and vanilla. Its unique smoked element is unfortunately underutilized. Though smoke remains a polarizing agent, many reaching for a bottle of Bonfire most likely have an affinity for smoky flavors. It’s a shame the company didn’t push this further; helping to add smoky complexity could have been a game changer. Smoked maple syrup is still a largely untapped concept, but there’s clear potential here if the company can better dial in the balance.

The bourbon in review comes from Batch #16.