Every fall, something special happens in a little Wyoming town most folks have never heard of. Out in Kirby, population barely 72, the guys at Wyoming Whiskey crack open the warehouse doors and roll out the next bottle in their National Parks series. This year, the fifth one, they’re calling it National Parks No. 5 – a straight bourbon built to honor the Grand Teton mountains that tower over the distillery like silent guardians.
If you’ve ever stood at Jenny Lake at sunrise or hunted elk along the Gros Ventre, you already know why the place gets under a man’s skin. Those jagged peaks don’t ask permission. They just rise up 7,000 feet straight out of the valley floor and dare you to look away. Wyoming Whiskey figured the only proper way to bottle that feeling was with a five-year-old bourbon aged right there in the shadow of the range.
Image credit: Wyoming Whiskey
They pulled a historic painting for the label – Thomas Moran’s “The Three Tetons,” painted back in 1895. Same picture that’s hung in the Oval Office more than once. Snow on the peaks, blue haze in the valleys, pine trees standing tall in the foreground. It’s the kind of scene that makes a guy think about loading the truck and heading west, even if he’s staring at it on a bottle in his den.
The whiskey itself is 96 proof, made only from grains grown in the Bighorn Basin and water that comes straight out of the limestone under the distillery. Nothing shipped in, nothing fancy. They let it ride through five years of Wyoming weather – hundred-degree summers, forty-below winters – in charred American oak. That swing is brutal on barrels, but it’s pure magic on bourbon.
Take a nose full and you catch warm honey crullers fresh from some roadside bakery, cinnamon sugar still clinging to the edges, a little orange peel and almond hiding underneath. First sip rolls across the tongue with almond and cherry liqueur, honey sweetness, and just enough vanilla to keep things smooth. Then the finish hits – cinnamon that warms you from the chest down, dark espresso, milk chocolate, and the faintest trace of leather, like an old saddle that’s seen a few decades of hard country.
Image credit: Wyoming Whiskey
Co-founder David DeFazio puts it plain: “Our company was born in the shadow of these mountains. Literally. And the Mead family has a rich history woven into the creation of the Park. This one’s personal.”
The Meads go way back in Jackson Hole. Brad Mead’s great-grandfather homesteaded there in 1890. They ran cattle, served in the legislature, helped draw the lines when Grand Teton became a national park. When Brad and his wife Kate teamed up with DeFazio to start the distillery back in 2006, they weren’t just chasing another business. They wanted something that tasted like home and gave back to the places that made Wyoming what it is.
That’s where the donation comes in. For every bottle of National Parks No. 5 sold, Wyoming Whiskey sent five bucks straight to the Grand Teton National Park Foundation. This year that added up to fifty grand. Over the life of the series they’ve pushed more than a quarter million dollars to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Acadia combined.
That money isn’t just feel-good PR. It’s rebuilt more than ten miles of the Teton Crest Trail so your boots don’t slide out from under you at 10,000 feet. It’s put tools in the hands of 250 volunteers who gave 17,000 hours keeping trails clear and teaching visitors how to keep bear spray handy. It’s brought 350 Indigenous kids back to ancestral ground most of them had never walked before. It’s funded studies on lynx and wolverine and grizzlies so those animals are still prowling when your grandkids finally make the trip.
Image credit: Wyoming Whiskey
DeFazio says it best: “Like most businesses in western Wyoming, we benefit greatly from the Parks and the economy they create. And for me personally, the Parks enhance my life in countless ways. Buying a bottle of NP5 not only puts money in the till for Grand Teton, it delivers a taste of Wyoming in every glass.”
The bottle carries an SRP of $74.99. It started hitting shelves across Wyoming on November 20th, and the distillery will ship nationwide through their website come December. If past releases are any indication, it’ll be gone before the snow melts off the high country.
So here’s the deal. Next time you’re sitting in the garage cleaning a rifle, or out on the deck watching another sunset you swear can’t be beat, pour two fingers of National Parks No. 5 over one big rock. Look at that Moran painting on the label. Think about the trail crews, the kids learning their history, the wolves still raising hell up in the Thorofare.
Then raise the glass to the mountains that don’t care how tough you think you are – and to the little distillery in Kirby that figured out how to put them in a bottle.
One sip and you’ll swear you can hear the Tetons calling you home.
