During the peak of the pandemic, Chris Stapleton would often awaken to find little unmarked bottles of whiskey on his doorstep. His bass player, J.T. Cure, would quietly drop off the caches of brown liquor at a few select houses, and later that day, Stapleton, Cure, and their friends would conduct blind taste tests over Zoom.
“That was our social activity,” Stapleton says. “It would inevitably just end with a bunch of guys cackling on Zoom, but it was fun.”
Stapleton didn’t know it then, but the tasting experience would serve him well when it came time to sample various prototypes of Traveller, his new blended whiskey made with Buffalo Trace Distillery, a distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, not far from where Stapleton grew up in Lexington. Released nationwide this month, Traveller — named after Stapleton’s 2015 breakout album — is a partnership between the singer and Buffalo Trace master distiller Harlen Wheatley. Stapleton says he was approached many times in the past about getting into the celebrity alcohol business, but it didn’t feel right until now.
“I’ve had people push me to do the ‘slap your name on the bottle’ kind of thing and I’ve had no real interest,” he says during a Zoom with Wheatley and Rolling Stone. “I wanted it to feel authentic, and beyond that, I just wanted it to be good.” For a country star who has a barrel’s worth of songs about whiskey — “The Bottom” on new album Higher, “Whiskey and You,” “Whiskey Sunrise,” the juggernaut “Tennessee Whiskey,” among them — it couldn’t be a more natural fit.
Stapleton, wearing a baseball hat with the hot-chicken logo of Nashville’s minor league team the Sounds, is taking a few days off in Florida. But he can’t escape the south’s cold snap: he spent the morning crawling beneath the house with a blowtorch, trying to defrost frozen pipes.
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