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.
… what we have here is no-name bourbon from somewhere. Where? The back of the bottle says “Distilled in Virginia and Indiana”, so if we take this at face value it’s probably MGP bourbon with some of the distillery’s own (very young) output mixed in? There are a number of other distilleries in Virginia, so it could be sourced from any of them. The website suggests that this “less than four year old” (uhh… so two year-old, the legal minimum) straight bourbon is from a mixture of old and young casks with an average age of 4-6 years. …
This is the kind of thing I like to cover. Sourced whiskey, yes, but from an actual startup distillery with an actual still that is now producing its own actual distilled whiskey. Nelson’s Green Brier distillery in Nashville, Tennessee was a pre-prohibition powerhouse in the Tennessee Whiskey scene…