Hudson Back Room Deal Rye Review

Back Room Deal arrived in September 2020 as part of Hudson's wholesale reinvention — new names, new recipes, new subway-tile labels, and the brand's first genuinely new expression in seven years. That timing matters when you go looking for reviews, because anything written about "Hudson rye" before 2020 is describing a different liquid in a smaller bottle. This one has no pre-rebrand history to confuse it with. What it has instead is a gimmick that turns out not to be a gimmick.

The Smoke Is Borrowed, Not Distilled

The name is a joke about the supply chain, and the supply chain is the product. Hudson empties its bourbon barrels, ships them to Scotland, lets a peated Scotch producer fill and mature whisky in them, takes the barrels back to Gardiner, and refills them with its own straight rye. By the time the rye goes in, the wood has been through three separate lives. There is no peated malt in the mash bill — the mash is the same 95% New York rye and 5% malted barley as the brand's flagship Hudson Do The Rye Thing. Every trace of smoke in the glass is second-hand, absorbed from staves. That is a meaningfully different thing from a peated-grain whiskey, and it explains why the smoke reads as soft and sweet rather than phenolic or medicinal.

Where Reviewers Disagree

Our pool is small, and it is divided on two points. The first is intensity. WhiskyCast's Mark Gillespie found "a hint of peat smoke"; Whisky Advocate's Julia Higgins called it "an undercurrent"; a Distiller reviewer simply wrote "Very smokey"; and another concluded it was "Not spicy. Not peaty. Drinks more like a sweeter bourbon." That is a wide range for a single bottling with no batch variation published. The second is weight. Gillespie's palate note is "thick and chewy." Good Spirits News opens with "light in body." One drinker landed on "kinda thin and medicinal but pretty good." We have scored body at a deliberately non-committal five because the evidence genuinely does not support anything sharper.

The Dill That Isn't There

Here is what nobody found. Across every source we read — brand copy, three published critics and seventeen community tasting notes — the words dill and caraway appear exactly zero times. On a 95% rye that is a real absence and worth naming plainly, because those two descriptors are what most drinkers mean when they say a whiskey "tastes like rye." What you get instead is cinnamon, clove and black pepper on a bed of honey and caramel, with dried fig and raisin adding darkness. It is recognisably a rye, but it is a sweet, baking-spice rye rather than a herbaceous one — closer in character to the gentler end of our high-rye whiskeys than to a classic Pennsylvania-style pour.

Our Verdict

A genuinely interesting bottle with a genuinely thin evidence base. What the sources agree on is that the cask trick works: the smoke integrates rather than sits on top, the sweetness carries it, and the finish is long for 92 proof. What they do not agree on is how much smoke you will actually get, or how substantial the whiskey feels. Buy it if you want something unusual to sit with, and buy it near $55 rather than near $75. It is a curiosity pour rather than a house rye — file it with the best rye whiskeys for sipping rather than the bottle you reach for on a Tuesday.