A Spirit Category Nobody Saw Coming
Whiskey drinkers have spent the last decade chasing every angle on the category — high rye mash bills, finishing in wine barrels, single barrel picks, and grain sourced from a single farm down the road. But nobody has really gone after the field pea. Branch & Barrel Distilling, based just south of Denver in Centennial, Colorado, has now released a spirit built around exactly that ingredient, and the distillery says it's one of the first times a field pea has ever shown up in a barrel-aged, whiskey-style spirit rather than just a quick-turn vodka or gin.
The release is called Peas Please, and it's not a gimmick cooked up overnight. It's the product of a mash bill that spends six years resting in a barrel, a direct relationship with a Colorado farm, and water pulled from an aquifer that's been filtering underground since before humans were around to drink from it.
Why Field Peas, and Why Now
Most people who've heard of pea-based spirits know them from the vodka aisle — clear, filtered, gone in seconds. What Branch & Barrel is doing is different. Field peas aren't the sweet peas you'd find in a garden or a can at the grocery store. They're a starchy, savory crop, closer in character to a dried bean than anything you'd eat off a fork at dinner. That starchiness is exactly what makes them useful for fermentation and distillation, and it's also what gives the finished spirit an earthy, almost savory backbone that corn and barley alone don't produce.
Peas Please isn't even the distillery's first swing at this. Back in 2023, Branch & Barrel put out a small single-barrel test batch using field peas, just to see what the grain could do. A year after that, they released an even more limited batch that paired the peas with hand-crushed white, pink and green peppercorns, chasing an earthy, spicy edge. This newest release strips that experiment back down. There's no pepper this time. It's a return to the original idea, but aged three years longer than that first test batch, giving the field pea character room to fully show itself.
The Actual Mash Bill
For anyone who wants the numbers, the mash bill for Peas Please breaks down like this: 64% corn, 22% field peas, and 14% barley. That's distilled and then left to age for six full years before bottling. Six years is a long time for any craft spirit to sit in a barrel, let alone one built around an ingredient this untested, and it signals that Branch & Barrel wasn't interested in rushing this to market just to capitalize on novelty.
A Direct Line to the Farm
The field peas used in this release didn't come from a wholesale grain broker. Co-owner Scott Freund worked directly with a farmer in Elizabeth, Colorado, a small town east of the Denver metro area, to source the crop specifically for this batch. That kind of direct sourcing relationship is becoming more common among craft distillers who want traceability, but it's still relatively rare for a specialty grain like field peas.
There's also a bigger agricultural story behind the choice. Field peas are often grown as a rotational cover crop, meaning farmers plant them between seasons of their primary crop, not as the main event. Cover cropping with a plant like field peas does real work for the soil — it helps replenish nutrients, keeps weeds from taking over bare ground, and can reduce the need for certain pest control measures. On top of that, field peas are notably drought-tolerant, which matters a lot in a state like Colorado where water is never something farmers can take for granted. By building a commercial product around a crop that's usually just a soil-health afterthought, Branch & Barrel is effectively creating a market reason for farmers to keep planting it.
Water That's Older Than the Recipe
Grain isn't the only local ingredient doing heavy lifting here. Peas Please is cut with water drawn from the Arapahoe Aquifer, a massive underground water source that sits beneath the Front Range and has been slowly filtering through layers of sandstone and shale for millions of years. Distillers talk about water sourcing a lot, sometimes to the point of cliché, but an aquifer that old genuinely does produce a different mineral profile than municipal tap water or a surface reservoir, and Branch & Barrel is leaning into that as part of what makes this bottle distinctly Colorado.
What It Actually Tastes Like
According to Mitchell Nester, Branch & Barrel's Master Blender, the flavor lands somewhere unexpected. "Peas Please has a smooth, rich, complex flavor, akin to bourbon-meets-anejo tequila," he said. That's a fairly bold comparison — anejo tequila brings its own agave-driven sweetness and barrel spice, so pairing that character with something built on corn, peas and barley suggests a spirit that doesn't fit neatly into one lane.
Nester also framed the release as bigger than just a flavor experiment. "This bottle was crafted to showcase uniquely Colorado ingredients and flavors you can't find in just any whiskey-style expression, while supporting local agriculture," he said. That's really the thesis of the whole project: an ingredient most drinkers have never thought about, sourced from one specific farm, turned into something that couldn't be replicated anywhere else.
Part of a Bigger Push in Craft Distilling
Branch & Barrel didn't start out as an experimental operation. The distillery's roots go back to the late 2000s, when its founders were aging spirits on tree branches long before they had an actual distillery to work out of. They opened their Centennial location in 2016 and have built a reputation since then on Colorado-grown bourbon, using the state's elevation and climate as part of the process rather than something to work around.
Peas Please fits into that same philosophy, just pushed further. Instead of asking what Colorado's climate can do for a familiar grain like corn or rye, the distillery is asking what an entirely different, underused crop can bring to the barrel. It's also a small case study in something the broader food and beverage industry is only starting to take seriously: building sustainability and regenerative farming directly into a supply chain, rather than treating it as a marketing add-on after the fact. Every bottle sold effectively becomes a small vote for a farmer in Elizabeth, Colorado to keep planting field peas as part of a healthier rotation.
Where to Find It
Peas Please is a limited release, and Branch & Barrel isn't promising it'll stick around. Given that the last field pea batch spawned a spinoff and now this six-year expression, there's a real chance this becomes an evolving series rather than a one-off. For now, the distillery is pointing people to its Tasting Room in Centennial, Colorado, where visitors can ask for the release by name while supplies last. For anyone curious about the rest of the lineup, or who wants to track down a bottle, more information is available at babdistilling.com.
