You Can Skip Most Celebrity Spirits—but You Need to Try Country Star Eric Church’s Whiskey Brand

Since launching in 2023, Whiskey Jypsi was built on an outsider ethos, and its master blender, Ari Sussman, embodies it fully. 

The brand—founded by country star Eric Church and entrepreneur Raj Alva—leans into cross‑category blending, heirloom grains, and a willingness to ignore the conventions that have long defined American whiskey. Sussman is the architect of that approach.

“I came to whiskey having spent a decade or so working in wine and cocktails,” he says. “So I came with a little bit of an outsider’s perspective.” Before he ever distilled a drop, Sussman was bartending around the world and spending summers in France working wine harvests. A discovery at the University of Michigan in the Jan Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, which contains a collection of old cocktail books and ephemera, opened his eyes to forgotten pre‑Prohibition spirits.

He wanted to recreate these lost flavor profiles, but he needed the science. That opportunity arrived when Michigan State University (MSU) launched one of the country’s first academic distilling programs. Sussman approached its founder, Dr. Chris Berglund, with antique recipes in hand.

“He hired me to come in and work at the distillery, and then ultimately to manage it for about half a decade,” Sussman says. MSU became an incubator for dozens of brands, giving him a deep technical foundation in fermentation, distillation, and flavor development.

But the more he learned, the more he questioned the industry’s sameness. “I was shocked by the level of homogeneity,” he says. Distillers were using the same grain varieties—“optimized for scale and yield, not flavor”—the same stills, the same yeast strains, the same cooperages. “It just seemed like the entire industry was choosing to think in the same way, meeting in the middle.”

Whiskey Jypsi became his platform to push back. From the start, the brand embraced blending mature whiskeys from different distilleries to create unique expressions. “People were skeptical,” he says. “They didn’t know that we could blend different categories of spirits together. They thought we were breaking some kind of rule. But there aren’t any rules.”

Beginning with the Legacy series ($200), instead of starting with available barrels that were for sale, Sussman and the team reverse‑engineered classic mash bills and then searched the world for mature components that could be combined to replicate those historic flavors. 

“It was absolutely risky,” he says. “What if you can’t find the right spirits?” But the results became the backbone of Whiskey Jypsi’s identity: blends with depth, character, and a sense of narrative.

Even for the brand’s most approachable release, Tribute Double Barreled Bourbon ($48), Sussman didn’t go out and just buy barrels of whiskey. He instead worked with a distiller to use a specific mash bill that he devised, which calls for heirloom grain, Cherokee White Eagle corn. Not surprising, his agricultural philosophy is equally unconventional. Drawing from his winemaking background, Sussman talks about “noble grains” the way vintners talk about noble grapes — heirloom varietals selected for flavor rather than yield. The label of the back of the Tribute bottle proclaims it  “A Celebration of Family Farms & Heirloom Grains.”

But the project that best captures his whiskey worldview is Declaration ($200), which was inspired by Maryland‑style rye. To evoke that historic flavor of whiskey, he blended together 20‑ to 25‑year‑old Canadian corn whiskey, eight-year-old American single malt and mature straight rye that was aged for a second time in apple‑brandy casks from George Washington’s Distillery in Mount Vernon, Virginia. 

Conceived as a nod to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the whiskey draws on a colonial‑era style and uses apple‑brandy barrels as a nod to the spirits Washington’s distillery produced at the end of the 1700s. “Whiskey is a snapshot,” he says. “It’s the record of the event of the whiskey makers in the room making decisions. It’s time‑stamped.”

Reconstructing a Revolutionary‑era rye wasn’t just a historical exercise — it was a statement about where he thinks American whiskey should go next. For Sussman, rye has always been the grain with the most expressive potential, the one capable of pushing the category forward. 

“Rye is the most flavorful of all the grains. The most punk‑rock and expressive whiskey grain there is,” he says. “You don’t get a revolution out of bourbon. You get a revolution out of rye."