Hudson Manhattan Rye Review
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Quick Facts
Is This For Me?
You want a piece of American craft-whiskey history — the first legal pot-distilled rye made in New York since Prohibition — and you like oak-forward, cereal-driven whiskey with real cinnamon and pepper behind it. It is also a genuinely good Old Fashioned base.
You want a bottle you can buy again. This expression was discontinued in 2020 and replaced, so remaining stock is old stock at inflated prices. Reviewers also split hard on it: the body reads thin to several, the wood reads raw to others, and the finish is genuinely inconsistent.
Flavor Profile at a Glance
What It Tastes Like
Nose
Newly sawn oak leads, with rye bread and raw cereal close behind. Maple syrup, a cool thread of mint and a stewed apple note fill in the gaps.
Palate
Cinnamon and black pepper arrive first, over tannic oak and dry clove. Cocoa and dark fruit sit underneath, and the texture is lighter than the nose promises.
Finish
Drying, with clove, cinnamon and tannic oak left behind. Length is the single thing reviewers disagree on most — calls run from "quite quick" to "long lingering."
Best Ways to Enjoy
Neat
Divisive. At 92 proof it carries more kick than the ABV suggests — one reviewer called it "a bit too hot to be merely warm" — and the light body leaves some wanting more.
With Water
A few drops help. Water takes the edge off the hot nose and lets the cereal and apple notes separate from the wood, which is where this whiskey is most interesting.
On Ice
Mixed reports. Chilling pushes the dark cherry forward but flattens the sweeter notes, so one of our reviewers preferred it neat once the ice went in.
Cocktail
Its strongest suit, though not in the drink on the label. The peppery spine cuts sugar and bitters cleanly, which is why the Old Fashioned keeps coming up.
Cocktail Scores
Price & Value
This is no longer a bottle with a price so much as a bottle with an asking price. The last published MSRP was $49.99 for 750ml and a live retailer listing sits near $57, but because the expression was discontinued in 2020 we also found sellers asking close to $200 for the same liquid. Value, in other words, depends entirely on which shelf you find it on. Nothing in the glass justifies a collector premium — this is a young craft rye, not a lost classic — so treat anything much above $60 as a curiosity tax. If you want the money to go further, our best value rye whiskey picks are a more sensible starting point.
Bottle Transparency
- DistilleryTuthilltown Spirits, 14 Grist Mill Lane, Gardiner, New York. Founded 2003 by Ralph Erenzo and Brian Lee; acquired by William Grant & Sons in 2010, with the distillery itself added in 2017.
- GrainRye, with roughly 90% of it grown within ten miles of the distillery. Published as a 100% rye mash bill for most of the bottle's life; one 2019 reviewer reported that later batches added around 10% malted barley. We could not resolve this — see the note below.
- DistillationDouble distilled in a copper pot still with a short column section. Bottled at 46% ABV / 92 proof.
- MaturationNew charred American oak, historically 3- and 14-gallon barrels; later bottlings blended three barrel sizes. Labelled "Stored in New Oak Less Than Four Years" — no age statement, and "less than" is doing the work.
- BottlingOriginally hand-filled, numbered 375ml apothecary bottles with a wax-sealed cork; moved to 750ml around 2019.
- FiltrationNon-chill filtered, uncoloured, per Whiskybase bottle data and Difford's Guide.
Full Review: Hudson Manhattan Rye
Hudson Manhattan Rye matters more as a historical marker than as a bottle. When Tuthilltown put it out, it was the first legally pot-distilled rye whiskey made in New York State in roughly seventy years, produced in a converted grist mill in Gardiner by two men who had originally bought the land to build a climbers' bunkhouse. Almost every New York farm distillery that followed was working from a template Tuthilltown wrote first. That is a real achievement, and it is worth saying plainly before getting to the whiskey itself, because the whiskey itself is a harder sell.
Read the Label Before You Read the Reviews
This bottle carries a naming problem serious enough that it shapes everything below. Hudson discontinued Manhattan Rye and, in September 2020, relaunched the line with new names and more mature liquid — Manhattan Rye became Do The Rye Thing, a 95% rye / 5% malted barley straight rye aged a minimum of three years and certified Empire Rye. That is a different whiskey with a different mash bill and a real age statement. Worse, the name change was not the only change: at least one reviewer tasting in 2019 reported that Manhattan Rye had already moved off its 100% rye mash bill to around 10% malted barley, while another reviewer two months earlier described the same 750ml bottle as still 100% rye. Reviews written in 2011 and reviews written in 2019 may not be describing the same liquid.
Wood First, Everything Else Second
What the sources do agree on is oak. Six of them put wood at the front of the nose in near-identical language — "newly sawn oak," "oak shavings," "green wood," "pencil shavings," "oak astringents." Difford's Guide, tasting a 2013 sample, landed on "overly oaked but in a strangely appealing way," which is about as fair a one-line summary as this whiskey gets. Small barrels move wood into spirit fast, and at under four years the extraction outruns the maturation. Behind it sits rye bread and raw cereal, and only then the sweeter material: maple syrup, a little stewed apple, and a cool mint note that three separate reviewers picked out independently.
On the palate the wood turns tannic and the spice arrives — cinnamon is the single most frequently named flavour in our entire pool, appearing in six sources across palate and finish, with black pepper close behind in five. Underneath there is cocoa and dark fruit, which is where the bottle gets genuinely interesting; Paste described it as "not unlike chocolate-covered cherries," and two other reviewers found cocoa without prompting. What is conspicuously missing is dill and caraway. Neither appears in a single source we checked. For a whiskey marketed on a 100% rye mash bill, that absence is worth naming — this does not taste like a traditional American rye, and several reviewers said as much in frustration rather than praise. If you want the full-rye category done properly, start with our 100% rye whiskey collection.
The Disagreement Is the Story
Across fourteen scored sources this bottle produced the widest spread we have seen on a single expression. Thirty-One Whiskey gave it a flat 5/5 and called it "autumn in New York." WhiskeyBon scored the same whiskey 71/100 and asked "what the hell is this stuff?" Whisky Advocate's Lew Bryson found the finish "quite quick"; Difford's found it "long lingering." Body runs from "light and a bit watery" to "slightly syrupy." Some of that is ordinary reviewer variance. A good deal of it is probably batch and mash-bill drift across a decade of production under one name, which is exactly why we are not presenting this score with confidence.
Our Verdict
A significant bottle and an uneven one. Buy it if you collect American craft-distilling history or you want the Tuthilltown story on your shelf; do not buy it expecting a benchmark rye, and do not pay a discontinued-bottle premium for it. If what drew you here was the New York rye idea rather than this specific label, the current release does the job better and is still in production. Everything else we have reviewed at this strength is in the sub-100 proof rye collection.
Community Tasting Notes
This score rests on fourteen independent scored sources, but one of them — a single 339-rating crowd pool — carries most of the weight. Remove it and the figure drops from 3.1 to about 2.8, a swing of 0.3, which is larger than we are comfortable with. Treat this number as provisional rather than settled, and note that reviews of this bottle span roughly a decade of production under one name during which the mash bill and bottle size both appear to have changed.
Top Reported Flavors
Rating Distribution
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Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuine landmark — first legal pot-distilled rye in New York in ~70 years
- Grain grown within ten miles of the distillery, distilled on site
- Non-chill filtered and uncoloured
- Real spice backbone — cinnamon in 6 sources, black pepper in 5
- Distinctive cocoa and dark-fruit thread you rarely meet in rye
- Strong Old Fashioned base at 92 proof
Cons
- Discontinued in 2020 — old stock only, often at inflated prices
- Mash bill contested between sources (100% rye vs ~90/10 with malted barley)
- Raw, green, tannic wood from young aging in small barrels
- Light body — "a touch watery" and "a bit thin" recur across reviewers
- No dill and no caraway in any source — not a classic American rye profile
- Reviewer scores range from 5/5 to 71/100 on the same name
Frequently Asked Questions
❓ Is Hudson Manhattan Rye discontinued?
❓ What replaced Hudson Manhattan Rye?
❓ Is Hudson Manhattan Rye really 100% rye?
❓ What proof is Hudson Manhattan Rye?
❓ How old is Hudson Manhattan Rye?
❓ Is Hudson Manhattan Rye good in a Manhattan?
❓ Is Hudson Manhattan Rye worth buying now?
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