Single Barrel, So What?

Everybody is getting into the single barrel act.

Blanton's was the first single barrel bourbon but it sure wasn't the last. These days, they're everywhere.

But so what? What's so great about "single barrel" whiskey?

You probably think single barrel is higher quality than something that is not single barrel, and that's usually true, but do you know why?

It has to do with how whiskey is made, not the front-end part of fermentation and distillation, but the back-end part, how most whiskey goes from barrel to bottle.

Major American whiskey distilleries each fill between 500 and 1,500 barrels a day. Those barrels go into aging warehouses where they will sit for the next several years. As they fill so shall they dump and the major American whiskey distilleries each empty between 500 and 1,500 barrels a day too.

Modern distilleries produce a very consistent product off the still. All of the whiskey going into the barrels is the same but immediately it starts to change and become different. No two barrels of whiskey age exactly the same way.

There are several reasons for this. First, no two trees are exactly the same. Whiskey barrels are very much a natural product and white oak is the wood of choice because of the favorable way it interacts with the aging spirit. Although most American-made whiskey is aged in Ozark Oak, some use wood from other parts of the country. Minnesota Oak is also popular.

To the extent there is terroir in whiskey, it's about growing conditions for the oak, not the grain.

Second, no two warehouse locations age exactly the same way. Aging conditions vary according to the location and orientation of the warehouse and the location of the barrel within the warehouse. A barrel near an outside wall, near the top and on the south side will be exposed to a lot more heat, for example, than one in the center on a low floor.

The differences between any two barrels can be great but more often they are small and subtle. Distillers used to mitigate those variations by moving barrels, a process called barrel rotation, but that takes a lot of labor and became too expensive. Still, producers want a consistent product, so they mix the contents of hundreds of barrels together in a big tank. This erases those subtle differences. The whiskey being prepared for bottling is then compared to previous batches and if it isn't exactly the same, it is corrected through the addition of whiskey selected for certain characteristics. This is how most whiskey is prepared for sale.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. People want consistency. They want the bottle of Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 they buy today to taste exactly like the bottle they bought last week or last year.

But back to the whiskey still in the barrel and those subtle differences. Does the existence of those differences mean some barrels taste better than others?

Yes, it does.

Old timers called them "honey barrels." They are exemplars of their type, perfectly balanced. They're rare, but not that rare. Theoretically, a single barrel product isn't necessarily a honey barrel. If single barrels are selected at random you will get the whole range of variation, from worst to best, but they aren't chosen that way. That's the key to "so what?"

With non-single barrel whiskeys, small flaws are erased and the whole batch can be adjusted to better match the brand profile. With single barrels, once a barrel is selected there is nothing else you can do with it. There is no place to hide. Because of this, there is very little point in doing a single barrel product if you are not going to seek out the very best barrels of a particular brand.

With a single barrel whiskey, you get to taste exactly what the distillery's tasters tasted when they selected that barrel, but unlike them you never have to taste the ones they rejected. Although the producers will never put it this way, they essentially cherry-pick the best of the best for single barrel and put the rest into the product's regular expression.

Another way to look at it is that this is whiskey in its natural state, as close to tapping a barrel as you can get.

The selection process is subjective, of course. You may prefer a brand's standard expression to its single barrel and there's nothing wrong with that, and some producers may not be as selective as others. The point is that single barrel really does mean something, and it means this.