Metallica plays concerts on a rotating stage. As the band thrashes through two-hour-plus sets of face-melting, adrenaline-pumping mayhem, the circular stage at the center of the stadium with Lars Ulrich's drumset planted firmly in the middle slowly turns a full 360 degrees. By the end of the show, every fan, between sporadic, ecstatic mosh pits, will have seen him play head on. Every fan will have had face time with lead singer James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett, and bassist Robert Trujillo. It's a show built around the fans, encompassing the fans, perfected in nearly 40 years on the road.

In August, Metallica released its own whiskey brand, Blackened, the first liquor from the band. It, too, is immersed in music. Created in collaboration with master distiller Dave Pickerell, a rockstar himself in the whiskey world, Blackened is serenaded with the band's discography new and very, very old until it vibrates, soaking in the controlled, thumping energy as flavor from the barrel. The spirit itself was born not of some later-in-life rocker despair, as the money dries up and the last farewell tour winds down, but rather an effort to make a modern whiskey for younger folks to embrace as their own, says Ulrich. And unlike, say, Bob Dylan's unenthusiastic sponsorship of Heaven’s Door, the band is fully behind it.

“I love it,” Ulrich told me over the phone a couple weeks back, during a short break from their current tour. “It's given me a new relationship with whiskey, obviously because you're super proud with what you've done. And the idea that you can reach for a bottle and go, I'm pouring some of my own beverage, that's pretty cool.”

In a market crowded with celebrity boozes, it's a whiskey worth drinking, from a band that wouldn't know how to put out a boring product if it tried.