Single Barrels are Special Barrels — Why I Love Bourbon Part 2
I like being special. You like being special. Everybody is special in their own way, just like every barrel of bourbon! It’s crazy to believe that less than 50 years ago someone “invented” single barrel bourbon. Even MTV was around before Single Barrel bourbon. Like before that people were just mixing it all together and drinking it like a bunch of plebs. They didn’t have stickers or wax or Facebook groups dedicated to turning palates into prodigies. Kinda fucked up if you ask me, I’m not sure sipping bourbon would have even been cool back then. Us whiskey folk would have found solace in sugared up cocktails and novelty shots, not some bottom shelf straight whiskey.
Back to the first ever single barrel bourbon. So there was this guy named Col. Albert Blanton, or maybe he was a horse, not too sure on that one. Anyhow, he was the OG Bourbon Heister. The dude would go to his favorite parts of the warehouse and pick his “honey barrels” which he would share with friends and family. It’s kind of like how Heaven Hill sends their best barrels as Henry McKenna Single Barrel to the SF Whiskey competition every year because that one barrel can win a medal for the brand, even if every other barrel is worse than it. Before Blanton, no one had even thought “yo, what if we just like bottled each barrel separetely.” Just like Larry Page and Sergey Brin one day were like “yo, what if we could just like type a question and find the answer from someone else over the internet.” We’re talking ground breaking shit here. What’s really sad though is Col. Blanton never lived to see his invention come to life. Though he had invented drinking only from a single barrel, it wasn’t until 25 years after his death that Buffalo Trace shared the glory of single barrel with the world: Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon.
For years, single barrel wasn’t really popular. It wasn’t super sought after, not really sure anyone cared to be honest. Now it’s the golden child of the bourbon community. But recently that has changed (okay not that recently, but shit has gotten a lot worse).
Single barrels can provide a really unique experience. For a while it was just a limited edition shelfie. You may have had plenty of batches of Old Weller Antique “107”, but got a similar experience with all of them. However, a good single barrel can hit on the perfect cherry cola not that you love and can’t get elsewhere. These honey barrels can shine in single barrels, where they’d be lost in batches. But with the good also comes the bad, because there are some shit barrels out there and you can bet your local shop owner who doesn’t even drink has probably bought one of those shitty barrels because people kept asking for it.
For a while single barrels were awesome. It was typically people who had been in whiskey for a while going on a trip to a distillery to taste through barrels, ultimately finding the experience they wanted to delivery to their audience. Some really solid bottles came out of it. It was a great way for enthusiasts to try new things, when they were really just trying the same things. Weller Antique picks could sit on the shelves at $27, they weren’t flying off the shelves by any mean. Today a Weller Antique pick gets announced and people from across the country are calling the shop to see if they’ll illegally ship the $80 over MSRP bottle to them so they can flip it to make $20.
So hype is at an all time high and brands are responding to it. Single Barrel programs have been introduced for more and more brands, and the experience has become less and less intimate. Sure COVID is part of that, but there were people who could go to KY and drink through 10s of barrels to find the right one(s) to buy, whereas now most pickers are getting 3 vials in the mail and have to select from those. What are the odds they are good? Remember, there are shitty barrels. Pick teams will taste through 3 samples and pick 1, then claim to be some sort of prophets of picking whiskey, when most of the pick is just being lucky with the samples they send you. Rarely do you hear people say no. Who would turn down that opportunity to buy a whole barrel! Now we have programs like Elijah Craig coming out with a barrel proof single barrel that is 5 years younger than its batched offering and $30 more expensive. I’m not a math guy, but that math doesn’t check out. Yet people are going to go nuts for it. Just like the idiots that think something hitting 140 proof (HAZMAT) suddenly makes a whiskey better.
On top of most single barrels being overpriced and generally shit, we have the tatering. For those unfamiliar with tatering, it’s basically the whiskey equivalent of the kids who create fan pages for Justin Bieber where they just post edited photos of Justin and think its something novel. The same amount of creativity goes into single barrels. Stickers add personality. I hope they teach that in The Wizarding School of Whiskey. I’ve seen them all. From people buying stickers on Amazon and putting them on bottles to be able to sell them for more money (spoiler alert, it worked), to half-assed photoshops, to hiring an artist to make a cartoon from scratch. Not gonna lie, some of the stuff is cool, but cool is not equal to good, which seems to be a common misconception. Then there is the wax. Wax, which is normally used as a way to create a seal, is now used just to look cool. Half of the time it doesn’t even come with a pull tab and means you get to carve at a bottle for a couple minutes worrying you’re going to take off your finger… it’s all part of the experience.
Let’s look at where whiskey is today. There isn’t a ton of depth in whiskey. It’s pretty easy to try most of the available spirits at a bar or through friends. There are a lot of limited releases out there now which help to satisfy that craving for more, but they’re harder and harder to get, so people either pay crazy amounts or just don’t get them. There are also a lot of people that are too good for shelfies because they aren’t cool (the people not the shelfies), so they only go after special bottles. Single Barrel picks are the intersect where shelfie meets special, so now you have a bottle that is relatively more attainable due to the smaller market size, yet is special in its own way. However, it’s being overdone and losing its charm. Single barrel used to mean something, but now its just a process for pick teams to feel special and offer whiskey to a group of people that also want to feel special. Sounds like some preschool shit if you ask me.
What’s even crazier is how some brands have grown out of this. Nashville Barrel Company has been selling 5–7 year single barrel bourbons of MGP which end up with MSRP of $100+. They just buy a ton of MGP stock and sell every. single. barrel. Again, there will be some shitty ones. But people go crazy for it. They’re probably paying ~$5/bottle for the juice from MGP, bottling it, waxing it, and adding a nice little stamp on it and boom profit. I’ve had some I enjoy, not going to lie, but damn am I mad I didn’t catch on this trend earlier. Basically printing money at this point.
In the age of participation trophies for every kid, the people who probably complain that not every kid is special, are out here buying every Single Barrel they can because of the sticker and pretending they are tough. Until Willy Wonka gets in the game and can give me a sticker that enhances the whiskey, I’ll stick to buying Single Barrels from people I know have connections to get to the honey barrels and have a proven track record of genuinely good picks. Stop being a bitch and pretending like every Single Barrel you have is special and unique.
