The Mystery — Why I Love Bourbon Part 1
I have always been a big fan of mystery. What once was a past time of passionate games of Clue with friends has turned into Guess the Distillery on the $200 bottle of Undisclosed Kentucky Bourbon picked by “the guy that quit some other distillery that people don’t love now because it was only good when that guy was there.”
I love introducing new people to bourbon. I love to pass on my passion for the spirits and the history, but my greatest joy is pointing out all the bullshit. I joked in my intro blog about this “School of Wizardry” which is just a whiskey marketing school that hands out the title of Whiskey Somm (a big F U to the Wine Sommelier community). In reality, marketing is a lot of what whiskey is today. We’ll talk about the wax and the stickers later, today I just want to talk about the mystery.
If we look at things from a high level, there are 3 states that are producing most of the “bourbon” and rye. Kentucky of course, but also Tennessee and Indiana. You probably see a ton of brands out there, but in reality a lot of brands tend to belong to the same distillery and multiple distilleries can belong to a portfolio. What appears to most as an industry with a ton of diversity is really a few big players creating a bunch of brands. Just to give a rough idea of how insane some of these conglomerates are: Here is part of the portfolio of The Sazerac Company. Buffalo Trace, Eagle Rare, Blanton’s, Weller, EH Taylor, Stagg, Elmer T Lee, Benchmark, Barton, Abraham Bowman, and more are all under the Sazerac Company umbrella. A lot of the distillate is even the same mash bill, just aged a little differently.
Beam Suntory owns Jim Beam, Bookers, Makers Mark, Knob Creek, Basil Hayden’s, Baker’s, Legent, and more. Heaven Hill owns Heaven Hill, Elijah Craig, Old Fitzgerald, Larceny, Parkers, Evan Williams, and more. It’s honestly insane. Many of you might already know this, it isn’t much of a mystery, however, it is also the reason there is a lot of mystery in the bourbon world.
Then we have contract distilleries like MGP who is the largest distillery in the country, but until recently, didn’t even bottle their own whiskey. You might have heard of brands like Smoke Wagon, Joseph Magnus, Angel’s Envy (Rye), Belle Meade, Barrell, High West (some products), Redemption, Smooth Ambler. These are just a few of the 100s of brands that purchase MGP distillate and bottle it themselves. There are tons of recipes, and can be a lot of differences in these whiskeys, but also can be a lot of similarities at crazy price disparities. If you see “Distilled in Indiana” it’s most likely MGP, so fortunately not much of a guessing game there.
Distilleries don’t bottle every barrel. We don’t always know why a distillery might not want the barrel, but barrels become available sometimes to independent bottlers (IBs), and the distilleries don’t want people to know it came from them. Maybe sometimes it works both ways where an IB buys shitty whiskey from Barton and wants people to think it might be Heaven Hill so it can bump up its value, but in most cases, the distilleries don’t like this info leaking and honestly its bullshit. We’ve seen more and more brands pop up as IBs that just go around, buy whiskey from distillery, apply marketing to said whiskey, and sell it for 5x what the distillery themselves probably would have.
A really stupid example of this mystery, albeit a well priced one, is the recent Bulleit Single Barrel Program. Bulleits program has 10 different recipes, consisting of 2 mash bills (high and low rye) and 5 yeasts. Sound familiar? It’s basically Four Roses model. The mashbill claimed only differ by 1% between the Bulleit and Four Roses which is small enough I could chalk it up as rounding. The yeasts of the Bulleit have very similar descriptions to those of Four Roses. So it’s either Four Roses, but Four Roses doesn’t want that to be known (all of the barrel heads are sanded so no info remains) or it is another Kentucky distillery that replicated exactly what Four Roses is doing 10 years ago, and just not silently began that product by selling it to Bulleit. If it isn’t Four Roses, some really weird shit is going on. I have a hard time believing it isn’t four Roses, but My Whiskey Neat has a good write up arguing for the latter.
Not all IBs are shady. Some IBs have gotten very creative in their marketing to tell the consumer exactly what they’re buying, as they should. Honestly it’s not that hard to skirt these NDAs. Look at Single Cask Nation’s 24yo Undisclosed Kentucky Bourbon that they described as being “from a distillery that had a very famous fire some years ago.” Pretty easy to realize that’s Heaven Hill. Wow, that was easy. Sometimes they give you the mashbill and that’s easy to connect to a distillery. Yet we have Doc Swinson out here with a endless supply of 15yo Kentucky Bourbon which has a mashbill of 78.5% corn/13% rye/8.5% malted barley that seemingly no distillery uses. We’ve seen this same exact mashbill and age show up in Bardstown Discovery Series, Old Soul 15 year, and more IBs. But no one will say who it is from. Well no one except for this seemingly small IB Master Picke who claims it is Jim Beam. Why doesn’t Beam want people to know this whiskey is from them? Does that mean it was too bad for them to bottle? Did they just want more money from it and felt they couldn’t get that from bottling it themselves? Are they testing the market? What is the motivation? And more importantly, if these other IBs are able to creatively leak it, why can’t all IBs do this?
Having to dive this deep into the internet to figure out where a whiskey is sourced from is dumb. I’m dumb for buying the whiskey without knowing. But an argument can be made that I’m dumb for caring. What does it matter is the product is good and you enjoy it? But it’s hard to try something first. I know the distilleries I tend to like more than others. I know the distilleries I tend to dislike even more. There is so much out there to buy, but everyone wants to buy something special and Small Batches or Single Barrels from a distillery are normally the best way to find that. We are now being asked to shell out 5x the price for a bottle with a big ? on it. So why should I pay more for less? Is this just marketing? Is Dr. Swinson a graduate of the Wizardy School for Whiskey Somms? I feel like we are all being bamboozled and instead of calling bullshit, we feed into it and then blow things up even more, playing right into the wizards hands.
And that’s just one reason I love bourbon so much. Bourbon Clue answer: “It was Jim Beam, in Warehouse K with Knob Creek.”
