Rep. Quigley Got Campaign Cash From Liquor Wholesalers Three Days Before Co-Sponsoring Their Monopoly Protection Bill.

As Dan Eggen reported in yesterday's Washington Post, Chicago-area representative Mike Quigley took a $2,500 campaign contribution from the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) three days before his support of their Alcohol Wholesalers Monopoly Protection Act (HR 5034) was announced.

I took Rep. Quigley to task for supporting this ridiculous legislation more than a month ago here. He has not yet replied to my letter.

Quigley isn't alone. The NBWA handed out more than $300,000 in contributions this year and virtually everyone who got some is a co-sponsor of the bill. Michigan Representative John Conyers, who chairs the committee considering HR 5034, got the biggest payday: $45,000. Everyone, of course, says the timing is a coincidence.

Timing isn't even the point. It just makes it easier to put the picture into focus.

I've also posted about this legislation here, here, and here.

Woodford Masters Collection Future Releases Revealed Exclusively To WHISKY Magazine (And Me).

The Woodford Reserve Masters Collection is an annual experimental whiskey release that began in 2005. Each release is different.

They are, of course, planned years ahead but Woodford has never revealed what it has in the pipeline until now, exclusively to me for WHISKY Magazine, Issue 89, available now.

Only the Maple Finish has been scheduled, for 2010, out this fall. The rest will roll out between 2011 and 2018 depending on what is ready in any given year. Get the current WHISKY Magazine for the full story.

• Maple Finish (2010). Mature Woodford Reserve bourbon finished in toasted sugar maple casks.
• Wine Finish. Mature Woodford Reserve bourbon finished in used wine casks (wine type to be announced).
• Tequila Finish. Mature Woodford Reserve bourbon finished in used Herradura Tequila casks.
• Rum Finish. Mature Woodford Reserve bourbon finished in used rum casks.
• Straight Rye Whiskey, Low BEP (Barrel Entry Proof). Whiskey made from a 100 percent rye mash with an 86° BEP (43% alcohol), aged in new charred barrels.
• Straight Rye Whiskey, Historic BEP. Whiskey made from a 100 percent rye mash with a 99.8° BEP (49.9% alcohol), aged in new charred barrels.
• Rye Mash Whiskey, Low BEP. Whiskey made from a 100 percent rye mash with an 86° BEP (43% alcohol), aged in used barrels.
• Rye Mash Whiskey, Historic BEP. Whiskey made from a 100 percent rye mash with a 99.8° BEP (49.9% alcohol), aged in used barrels.
• Straight Malt Whiskey. Whiskey made from a 100 percent barley malt mash with a 124.8° BEP (62.4% alcohol), aged in new charred barrels.
• Malt Mash Whiskey. Whiskey made from a 100 percent barley malt mash with an 86.6° BEP (43.3% alcohol), aged in used barrels.

Shutdown Season.

The whiskey distilleries in Kentucky and Tennessee typically shut down during the hottest summer months. Historically this had a practical purpose as it can be very hard to control fermentation, which produces heat as one of its byproducts, when atmospheric heat and humidity are already high.

With today's modern chiller systems and other process controls it is possible for distilleries to run year round and they more-or-less do, although most still have a shutdown of at least two weeks in August.

The shutdown is a chance to do deferred maintenance and repairs, install new equipment, make changes, and do any other work that can't be done while the distillery is in operation. For some companies shutdown is a good way to handle employee vacations.

It's unfortunate that shutdown typically occurs in August, the busiest season for visitors. As tourism becomes more important to revenue streams, they may change that scheduling. Although in some ways, if you're touring a distillery in August you should be glad it's not operating. It gets hot in there.

Shutdown is also a good way to adjust the distillery's output for the year. If you are a bit overstocked with new make, you can correct that quickly by extending your shutdown by a few days or weeks.

Like most manufacturing enterprises, whiskey makers have gotten good at managing just-in-time supply chains, but that means many other pieces of the supply chain are forced to shut down when the distilleries do.

Cooperages, for example. It's hard to imagine the volume of barrels Independent Stave and Brown-Forman produce. Jack Daniel's, the largest single distillery, fills more than 10,000 barrels (at 53 gallons each) a week. Neither the cooperages nor the distilleries have space for storing thousands of empty barrels. At the distilleries, the cooperage trucks pull up and unload new barrels directly into the filling area. By the time one truck is emptied they're ready for the next one.

So when distilleries stop filling barrels cooperages have to stop making them. Presumably it's like that all the way back to the forest. When the distilleries stop distilling the lumberjacks stop cutting.

News About Rittenhouse Rye And Bernheim Wheat.

Heaven Hill is full-line distilled spirits company but they were founded in 1935 as a whiskey distillery and American whiskey has always been the centerpiece of their portfolio. In addition to bourbon they make rye and corn whiskey, and are the only major distillery that makes wheat whiskey.

During American whiskey's darkest days -- roughly the two decades between 1970 and 1990 -- they were one of the few distilleries that continued to make rye whiskey. Their reward was to be well-positioned to capitalize when rye suddenly got hot a few years ago. This year WHISKY Magazine declared Rittenhouse Rye Bottled-in-Bond to be the best American whiskey, period, better even than all of the bourbons. This from a product that sold for about $12 a bottle a few years ago and is still less than $20.

Rittenhouse is Heaven Hill's brand and they have enjoyed its success except for one little thing. Ever since Heaven Hill's Bardstown Distillery was destroyed by fire in November, 1996, all of Heaven Hill's rye whiskey has been made at Brown-Forman. This was necessary because Heaven Hill's new distillery, Bernheim in Louisville which they bought from Diageo in 1999, didn't have enough capacity.

The news is that they have increased Bernheim's capacity by about 40 percent and nearly two years ago moved all of their rye production there. Okay, something that happened two years ago may not be news, but just remember that we won't actually have any of that whiskey in bottles for another two years.

They are now mashing rye one day a month, which is up from three or four days a year just a few years ago. Supplies are very tight right now but a batch of nearly 1,000 barrels will come of age in October, so it should be much easier to find after that.

Although they weren't making rye whiskey at Bernheim at first they were making wheated bourbon for Old Fitzgerald, which they acquired with the distillery. Wheated bourbon is still bourbon, i.e., mostly corn, but it contains wheat instead of rye as a flavor grain.

With all of that wheat around they also hit on the idea of making a straight wheat whiskey. Although everyone assumes people made wheat whiskey before Prohibition, there is no record of it, and although a few micro-distilleries have made wheat whiskey, Heaven Hill is the only major producer that makes it. (A wheat whiskey mash must be at least 51% wheat.)

Heaven Hill started to make wheat whiskey shortly after they bought Bernheim and started to sell it in 2005 under the name Bernheim Original, with a suggested retail price (SRP) of $39.99. The label doesn't state an age but Heaven Hill says it is five years in wood.

Now in its fifth year on the market, Bernheim Original has grown slowly. Each year they have made a little more. At the beginning of this year they decided to start driving more volume by cutting the SRP to $29.99. They also added a brand ambassador, Rob Hutchins, who is responsible for Heaven Hill's premium American whiskey portfolio, including Rittenhouse Rye and Bernheim Wheat.

I like both of these products very much. Even though the price has gone up, Rittenhouse Rye is still a great value and $30 is the right price for Bernheim Wheat, so while maybe this news is not exactly timely, it is undeniably good.

HR 5034 Is A Clear Example Of Economic Protectionism Designed To Shore Up Monopoly Profits.

This has to be a first, me recommending an Issue Analysis from the Freedom Works Foundation (Dick Armey's outfit), but this paper about HR 5034 is right on.

The title's a dud but the paper is good.

"No Wine Shall Be Served Before Its Time—At Least Not Without Wholesalers Taking a Cut."

He flubbed the old Paul Masson slogan. It was, "we shall sell no wine before its time," but his fact-checking otherwise is solid .

It is a libertarian argument and one that I endorse. The way alcohol is regulated in this country is a good example of government using its power to protect the private profits of favored clients. If passed, HR 5034 will only make it worse.

White Whiskey And The Tyranny Of The New.

I was at an event last night, pitching bourbon woo. Also there was my friend Meg Bell from Koval Distillery. They make unaged grain spirits -- white whiskey -- although Koval doesn't use that term.

This wasn't exactly a straight whiskey crowd, yet people seemed to know the term "white whiskey" and what it meant. How is that possible? People barely know what whiskey is but they already know what white whiskey is?

(I was already thinking about white whiskey yesterday because of Kevin Erskine's post about Death's Door.)

I guess it's the Tyranny Of The New. White whiskey isn't even new, it's just a new name for something that has been around forever, something people stopped drinking more than a century ago when better tasting distilled spirits became cheap and widely available.

White whiskey and its micro-distillery kin, very young whiskey, are not so new that they haven't already generated some pushback, as Steve Ury demonstrates here.

Death's Door White Whiskey.

Yesterday I told you about how U.S. law can magically turn vodka into whiskey.

Today I'm here to tell you about another peculiarity in the law. To be called whiskey a spirit must be distilled from grain and stored in oak containers, but the law doesn't say how long it has to be stored.

Now let's say you want to make an un-aged grain spirit called "white whiskey." Can you?

I'll let Kevin Erskine of The Scotch Blog explain the rest of it to you in this excellent post.