The Tennessee whiskies are all made at Dickel’s historic Cascade Hollow Distillery near Tullahoma, Tennessee, from a mash bill of 84% corn, 8% rye, and 8% malted barley. The “No. 12” (which has a large 12 on the label, something that I consider to be confusing for people accustomed to seeing ages of maturation so prominently featured) is actually aged between…
Breaker comes to us (by way of some place in Kentucky, where they actually distill bourbon) from Santa Barbara county, and the name and bottle labels are inspired by the wave ‘breakers’ on the nearby California central coast. … small batches from actually small batches of 8 sourced barrels of high-rye bourbon, each at least 5 years of age, and bottles at 45% ABV.
The Small Batch is bottled in bond and (therefore) is 50% ABV and at least 4 years old. It’s appropriate that this whiskey is bottled in bond, because its namesake Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor, Jr. was one of the first proponents of the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897, which protected American bourbon from unscrupulous retailers and counterfeiters.
The bourbon’s basic recipe is a low-rye mash bill of 77% corn, 13% rye, and 10% malted barley. It’s aged for 4 years (probably exactly, considering the volume that the company puts out), allowing it to be called “Straight Bourbon” without an age statement on the bottle.
When a bottle label says that it was a “small batch” of whiskey “aged in 5 different barrels” my mind automatically Google Translates that into “made from leftover barrels that we didn’t know what to do with.” That may or may not be fair but I just write a blog so I don’t have to be fair. Apparently the blend started as a personal project for the owner…
…what Brown-Forman realized is that by taking their standard 72% corn, 18% rye, 10% malted barley bourbon and re-casking it into one of these brand-new casks for a little under a year, you restart the process and get a double dose of those “early” readily-available compounds into the whiskey. Further, by heavily toasting and lightly charring (instead of the usual heavy charring) the second barrel, you encourage a slightly different set of compounds to develop in the charred surface of the oak. Brilliant.
According to the marketing spin on Forgiven, a warehouse worker accidentally blended some Wild Turkey straight rye into some Wild Turkey straight bourbon, which automatically made a blended American whiskey that can’t be called “straight” anymore. Presumably the accident tasted pretty good so Wild Turkey bottled it as a limited edition, small batch blend at 45.5% ABV…
This review is for the Straight Bourbon (not the Alabama Style), which is sourced whiskey from an undisclosed Kentucky distillery. The Internet suggests Heaven Hill is likely, although KBD (now MGP) sourced the whiskey for the first couple of runs of Conecuh Ridge Alabama Style whiskey, so it’s also possible that Clyde May’s continues that practice…
Bottles in recent memory of Old Bardstown were sourced whiskey, but now that Willett has liquid of legal age it has switched the label and the contents to reflect that. Old Bardstown is a classically styled bourbon, with a mash bill of 72% corn, 13% rye, and 15% malted barley. The whiskey is aged in new charred oak barrels for 4 years and bottled at 45% ABV.
Ghost Hill is a “wheated” Texas bourbon at 2 years of age using 53% Texas No. 1 corn, 36% Texas wheat, and 11% American barley all milled at nearby Barton Springs Mill. The corn and wheat are heirloom grains grown by Texas farmers. The grains are mashed, fermented, distilled, barreled, aged, and bottled on-site at the company’s ranch in Dripping Springs, Texas.
