Is rye whiskey high in alcohol?

What to know about rye whiskey

Rye whiskey gets its dry, peppery bite from the mash bill. US federal rules require at least 51 percent rye grain before a bottle can be called rye, the same threshold bourbon has to clear for corn, and that swap of grain is the entire flavour difference. Confusingly, Canadian whisky is allowed to be labelled rye with little or no rye in it at all, so the word on the front is not always a recipe. For trigger purposes the grain matters less than what fermentation and time in charred oak leave behind. Rye grades borderline on histamine and on tyramine, in line with bourbon and scotch and a notch above the generic whiskey entry, because the congeners that make it through a whiskey still and then build up in wood include the amines that people feel as flushing, a thumping head or a heart that will not settle. It is graded clean of oxalate, glutamate and nitrite, borderline on salicylate and sulfite from the barrel, and the gluten question has a short answer: distillation leaves the rye protein behind, so plain rye whiskey is graded gluten free even though rye grain is not.