by Lew Bryson
But don’t pity the American distillers. They have their own methods of innovation.
Anatomy of a Mashbill
The Yeast
Use a different yeast, or run it at a different temperature, and you get variations in the esters from fermentation. Bourbon distillers can be quite particular about their yeasts and carefully preserve the strains. Vary the amount of backset — sour mash — in the fermenter, and you’ve made another change.
Four Roses: Five Yeasts
Four Roses takes the concept of varying bourbon by using different yeasts and mashbills to extremes. Its distillers use a combination of 5 different yeast strains and two mashbills to make 10 quite different bourbons, which they then age in single-story, relatively small warehouses to minimize any differences from aging conditions. After all, why go to all that trouble making 10 different whiskeys only to introduce more variables?
Once the whiskeys are aged, master distiller Jim Rutledge will “mingle” them for the flagship yellow-label Four Roses bourbon, or select a smaller group to create the Small Batch, or pick a parcel of one type for a single-barrel bottling. The Four Roses single barrels can be unique, even idiosyncratic, and are a rare opportunity to discover just what yeast can do for a bourbon.
The different yeast strains, with their in-house letter code and the contributions they make to Four Roses, are:
V. A slightly fruity, well-rounded classic bourbon character
K. Spicy; needs longer aging to develop
F. More floral, herbal, soft, and full
O. Quite fruity and complex, with a long finish
Q. Huge floral nose, quite fresh and delicate
The Barrel
As noted earlier, the column stills are pretty uniform, but what comes after distillation is anything but. That’s when the whiskey enters the barrel, and barrels aren’t just identical wooden containers. Distillers are quite specific about the wood in their barrels: where it’s from, how long it’s air-dried, and how deeply it’s charred. As wood science advances, more changes are being made in how barrels are made; toasting the heads (the ends of the barrels) is becoming more common. Toasting doesn’t char the wood, and it creates a somewhat different set of chemical compounds in the oak, which in turn have a different effect on the whiskey.
“Aldehyde-y”
The first time I went to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival was in 1998, and one of my favorite events was the Bourbon Heritage Panel, six eminent figures from the industry taking questions and discussing bourbon. One of the first things they did was taste a bottle of pre-Prohibition bourbon donated by the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History in Bardstown (where the panel took place). The bottle was distilled in 1916 and bottled in 1933: 17 years in the barrel.
The panel swirled, sniffed, and speculated on how this bourbon might be different from today’s whiskey. Heaven Hill president Max Shapira pointed out that there were no hybrid corn strains available then and that the ratios of the mashbill would probably be different. Bill Friel, retired master distiller at Barton (now the Tom Moore distillery), thought a big difference would be that the whiskey probably came off the still at a lower proof than is common today and went into the barrel at a lower proof as well.
The whiskey, unfortunately, was a disappointment. Wild Turkey’s Jimmy Russell and Bill Friel put their heads together and discussed it, then announced that they found it to be resinous and “aldehyde-y” (aldehydes have a floral or fruity character, and too much is out of character for whiskey), probably from being too long in the wood, or something wrong with a stave in the barrel. “Maybe a sap pocket,” said Jimmy.
That’s one of the issues that drives the high price of super-aged bourbon: risk. Old doesn’t always mean better. You have to know when to bottle it, before aging becomes destructive.
The Maker’s Mark distillery in Loretto, Kentucky, is a registered National Historic Landmark, being the site of a former mill and distillery erected in 1805.
The Warehouse
Then there’s the part that’s always held a special interest for me: the warehouse or, as it’s sometimes called in Kentucky, the rickhouse (the wooden racks that hold the barrels are called “ricks”). Warehouses will age whiskey differently depending on how they’re built. The ironclads, usually built to seven stories tall (some are four or five, some new ones are nine) with a metal skin on a solidly built wooden frame, are the most common. They have good air circulation, and the thin metal walls mean temperature shifts have a more rapid effect (although 20,000 or more 53-gallon barrels full of whiskey won’t change thermal direction on a dime).
“It’s just a shell to keep out the weather,” said Jimmy Russell of the metal skin. “If it wasn’t for the water damage, it might even be better to leave it off.”
The height has an effect as well; rising heat concentrates in the top floors, and the whiskey is pushed harder into the wood there. The whiskey in these barrels will age more quickly, evaporate faster, have a woodier, drier, spicier flavor, and become astringent and smell sharply of acetone if left too long. “High and dry” has a whole different meaning in whiskey aging.
Stone and brick warehouses have less air movement in them because of their solid construction. They’re also lower than the ironclads, generally topping out at three or four stories. Brown-Forman uses brick and stone warehouses for its “cycling” process in aging Old Forester, Early Times, and Woodford Reserve. The warehouses have steam heat, and during the winter the distillers use the steam to gently raise the warehouse temperature. As master distiller Chris Morris explained, there are temperature probes in some of the barrels, scattered through the warehouse. Say the temperature outside goes down to 20°F (−7°C); when the temperature in the barrels gets down to about 60° (16°C) (Chris carefully couched all of this in very general terms), the heat goes on. It stays on until the whiskey gets up to around 80° (27°C), which might take a week; then the heat goes off until the whiskey gets down to 60° again. Once winter’s over they stop cycling and let nature do its thing.
The historic Tom Moore Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, home of Very Old Barton
Morris’s explanation of how the cycling works applies to normal aging as well. “The absorption of spirit and water is pretty linear,” he said. “Hot or cold, you have material from the wood being absorbed by the spirit. The ‘breathing’ of the barrel comes from the change of the seasons. It brings oxygen in [through the wood], which creates oxidation and the creation of aldehydes, the fruit and spice.”
“In an ironclad, that takes a long time,” he continued. “Mother Nature does it slow. Back in the 1870s, it was thought that an aggressive cycling in the winter would lead to more fruit and spice flavors. The absorption still takes time, but you can use that time better. Old Forester uses both [cycling and non-cycling-aged whiskey], and you can really control your flavor profile by matching barrels with different flavors.”
Why the different types of warehouses? “It’s because every distiller has his own opinion,” Heaven Hill master distiller Parker Beam told me. “Some people would say about [one type of] warehouse, ‘Oh, I’d never build ’em that way.’ Someone else may say, ‘Oh, hell, that don’t matter.’ These small quirks are what set them apart from another.”
Where the warehouses are sited also makes a difference. I call it “Kentucky feng shui.” Warehouses on hills catch more airflow from wind, though they can also be more vulnerable to thunderstorms and tornados there. Wind can blow the metal skin and roof right off a warehouse — you just replace it — and a tornado can destroy a warehouse, or in some cases twist it so badly that the barrels can no longer be rolled in and out. In those extremes there’s not much to do other than laboriously take all the barrels out and put them in another warehouse, tear the twisted warehouse down, and start over.
Some distillers insist on a north-south orientation for warehouses so they catch the day’s sun evenly. Warehouses may be shaded by trees — or distillers may cut trees away from warehouses —
or set near a river or stream. Former Buffalo Trace warehouse manager Ronnie Eddins told me that he was sure the regular fog off the Kentucky River beside the warehouses — and the way it would wetly come right in the windows — gave his whiskey a “sweeter, more mellow taste.”
“You have to study everything,” he explained, “and try to pinpoint what you could do to make it better. It’s been a constant fascination. You find a piece and try to figure it out, and then, next thing you know, you’ve got a big project.”
A River of Fire
Think about what an ironclad bourbon warehouse is: it’s about a million gallons of fuel-strength alcohol, contained and supported by tons of either alcohol-soaked oak, or dry, seasoned timber supports. It’s a bomb just waiting to go off.
That’s what happened back in 1996, when Heaven Hill’s Bardstown facility suffered a disastrous fire. Seven warehouses full of bourbon were lost, and an 18-inch-deep river of burning whiskey flowed down the hill and destroyed their distillery.
The folks at Heaven Hill understandably don’t even like talking about that day, but Fred Noe, spokesman for Jim Beam (and son of revered Jim Beam distiller Booker Noe) told me about the fire. “I couldn’t get closer than about a quarter mile,” he said. “It was just that hot, and loud. They could see the fire up in Louisville [about 30 miles away].”
The fire took place in pouring rain; the whiskey was burning too hot to even notice. “You ever seen a warehouse fire?” Noe asked. “It burns so hot when that whiskey gets going, and all that seasoned wood . . . when it burns out, all you’ve got left is just a pile of steel hoops. That’s all that’s left.”
In the wake of the Heaven Hill fire, and smaller fires at Jim Beam and Wild Turkey, new regulations were put in place. Warehouses have to be surrounded by a berm to contain burning whiskey, and there are now sprinkler systems and multiple escape routes. Fire is still a distiller’s nightmare, but it’s a bit more under control.
The Whiskey Team
Here’s where the final factor in what makes bourbon different comes in: people. Whiskey making tends to be a job with long tenures. Ronnie Eddins, for example, started at Buffalo Trace in 1961 and was the warehouse manager from 1984 till not long before his death in 2010.
The bourbon we’re drinking today was shaped by an amazingly long-working group of men, all of whom worked at their respective distilleries for decades. Some have retired, and some, sadly, have died, but all of them have made decisions over at least 20 years that put their stamp on the whiskey. Here’s who I’m talking about.
Bill Friel (Barton/Tom Moore)
Booker Noe (Jim Beam)
Elmer T. Lee and Ronnie Eddins (Buffalo Trace)
Jim Rutledge (Four Roses)
Jimmy Russell (Wild Turkey)
Lincoln Henderson (Brown-Forman)
Parker Beam (Heaven Hill) A bronze statue of Booker Noe, master distiller for Jim Beam for 40 years, sits outside the distillery in Clermont, Kentucky.
Even Jimmy and Parker’s sons — Eddie and Craig, respectively — have already put in decades as distillers at Wild Turkey and Heaven Hill.
What decisions do distillers and warehouse managers make that the marketing and budgeting people don’t? Often they have a lot of input on how much whiskey is made, where it’s warehoused, what kind of warehouses get built, and the taste profiles of new whiskeys (and the slow evolutions of established ones). They also serve as the whiskey’s memory, keeping the good traditions, letting the unimportant ones go, and making sure no changes affect the quality of the whiskey.
For instance, when cypress, the wood traditionally used for bourbon fermenters, was just no longer available in the quantities needed to build the big tanks, master distillers at the various plants were responsible for the tests that would determine whether steel tanks would still make the same whiskey (happily, they do). Some distillers still use cypress — but that’s their tradition.
The real job of the distillers, and the warehouse managers, is to be aware. They need to be aware of the climate, the costs of their business, the quality of the grain and the wood they get from their suppliers, the conditions of their facilities, the quality of the work done by the staff. They also need to be aware of how the whiskey’s doing, all the time, which is why regular sampling is a big part of the job.
That’s the thought behind something Ronnie Eddins told me, barely 3 years before he died. “You know, in your life, you only get about two chances to learn from a 15-year-old bourbon,” he said. “There’s your first one, and you learn from it all along the time, and you put all that into the second one. By the time the second one’s done . . . you’re usually about done too.” Poetic words from a man who had a largely unsung role in the development of some of the best bourbons Buffalo Trace ever produced.
Tennessee Whiskey
You may be wondering why I haven’t yet mentioned Jack Daniel’s (or maybe you’re one of the smaller but just as loyal group of fans who are wondering why I haven’t mentioned George Dickel). After all, Jack Daniel’s is the biggest-selling American whiskey, in the United States and around the world.
Daniel’s and Dickel aren’t labeled as bourbon, though. They’re Tennessee whiskeys (or “whisky,” as Dickel labels say). There is no mention of Tennessee whiskey in the U.S. standards of identity, nor is there any mention of the “Lincoln County process,” the filtering of the unaged spirit through 10 feet of hardwood charcoal (and a white wool blanket), a process that makes Tennessee whiskey . . . Tennessee whiskey.
That is, according to Brown-Forman, which makes Jack Daniel’s, and presumably also according to Diageo, which owns George Dickel. But if you look at the standards of identity closely, you’ll see that both of these brands do everything necessary to be labeled as “straight bourbon whiskey,” and do noth-ing that would prevent them from being so labeled.
So what are they? Let’s look at that. Jack Daniel was a real person, who really did distill whiskey at the current site of the distillery named for him, from the gushing pure waters of Cave Spring. The charcoal filtering — which the distillers usually call “mellowing” or “leaching” — was fairly common back in the early 1800s. Exactly how it came to be called the Lincoln County process is one of those tantalizingly unclear whiskey mysteries, but it’s a cool name, so leave it be.
The Lincoln County process is something to see. At both Jack Daniel and George Dickel, the charcoal is made on-site from sugar maple wood. They get the wood already air-dried and sawed into 2-inch by 2-inch billets, about 5 feet long. These are then stacked into “ricks” by laying six billets side by side, with about a 6-inch gap between them. Another such layer is laid on crossways, and so on, until the ricks reach up to 6 to 8 feet high. The ricks are set in squares of four, with a centrally inclined lean so that they’ll collapse inward as they burn, rather than fall apart.
When it’s time to burn, the ricks are sprayed with alcohol and set on fire. They are burned in the open air to allow the release of any impurities in the wood that would contaminate the kilned charcoal. The wood will burn for 2 or 3 hours, being wet with hoses most of the time to control the burn. The fire burns hot, but the tenders never let it get roaring. Once the burning is over, the charcoal is allowed to cool before being broken up into pieces about the size of large peas.
Ricks of sugar maple billets are fired to create the charcoal used in Tennessee whiskey’s Lincoln County process of “mellowing” or filtration.
The charcoal goes into the mellowing vats, which are about 10 feet deep and 5 feet across; a white wool blanket is stretched across the bottom to contain any charcoal dust that comes loose. At Jack Daniel the new make spirit trickles through the vats. At Dickel the vats are completely filled with spirit before any is tapped off the bottom, and they are refilled as they drain off; the charcoal is said to be “drowned.” The vats at Dickel are also chilled; the story is that they noticed the whiskey tasted better when it had been mellowed in the winter, so that’s how they filter all of it. (Ast
ute readers may note that this is how you “chill filter” whiskey to remove compounds that can turn the whiskey cloudy if it gets cold, a practice used by many distillers, though not with so much charcoal.) Dickel also uses two wool blankets, one on the top and one on the bottom.
What’s the process do? I tasted three samples of spirit at Dickel once. The first was right off the beer still: grainy, muddled in aroma and flavor. The next was off the doubler, the pot still–like step that follows the column-style beer still. It was remarkably cleaner, both to the eye and on the palate, and was unmistakably the taste of sweet, pure corn. The third sample was off the mellowing vat: it had pulled off the corn’s oiliness and down-home cooked character, leaving a lighter, purer spirit: corn eau-de-vie. The process had not added flavor (which would be forbidden by the standards of identity anyway); it has been taken away, leaving only the gentle heart of the grain.
The Corn Continuum