Barton to Release 1792 Sweet Wheat Bourbon

In January of 2009, Sazerac acquired from Constellation Brands the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown as well as a large portfolio of brands, including a super premium bourbon, 1792.

As Sazerac (which also owns Buffalo Trace) dug in, they discovered that Barton had been making wheated bourbon for no apparent reason, i.e., they had no wheated bourbon products nor was there any indication that they had been making it for a customer. At the time, Sazerac said they weren't sure what they were going to do with it. Now we know.

Wheated bourbon is a style of bourbon that uses wheat in the mashbill instead of rye. It is not to be confused with wheat whiskey, in which wheat is more than 51 percent of the mashbill. In a wheated bourbon, wheat is typically 12 to 15 percent of the mashbill, the bulk of which is still corn. The best known examples are Maker's Mark, W. L. Weller, and Old Fitzgerald.

The flagship expression of 1792 was launched in 2003. It is a rye-recipe bourbon with a higher-than-normal barley malt content, although the exact percentage has never been disclosed. It also features a yeast strain not used for any other brands. The product was created by Barton Master Distiller Bill Friel not long before he retired. Barton was late to the super premium bourbon game but 1792 was well received. (Named, by the way, for the year Kentucky became a state.)

Now the Barton 1792 Distillery is set to release its first 1792 line extension, called 1792 Sweet Wheat. It was distilled in 2007 so, like the flagship, it is eight years old.

“Using wheat instead of rye gives the taste profile a softer and more delicate flavor,” said Ken Pierce, director of distillation and quality assurance. “The soft flavor is balanced by rich oak tannins extracted by the bourbon while aging in the charred oak barrels.”

Wheated bourbons tend to taste sweeter than rye-recipe bourbons. They aren't, but they seem sweeter because rye adds dryness. With no rye to balance it, all of the sweetness from the wood shines through.

1792 Sweet Wheat is bottled at 91.2° proof (45.6% ABV). Bottles are expected to hit stores this summer at a suggested retail price of $32.99. The distillery plans to release several additional expressions of 1792 over the next few years. “We have some remarkable whiskeys aging in Bardstown,” said marketing director Kris Comstock. “We’re excited to unveil them over the next several years.”

The Barton 1792 Distillery is part of Barton Brands of Kentucky, with facilities in Bardstown, Ky., Carson, Calif., and Baltimore, Md. Barton Brands is owned by the Sazerac Company, an American family-owned company based in New Orleans, LA. Barton 1792 Distillery was established in 1879 by Tom Moore and continues today as the oldest fully-operating distillery in the 'Bourbon Capital of the World,' as Bardstown likes to call itself.

The Barton 1792 Distillery is located on 196 acres and includes 28 warehouses, 22 other buildings, the Morton Spring and the Tom Moore Spring. It has a gift shop and offers tours.

In Which I Stick Up for Diageo (a Little)

Diageo, the largest company in the distilled spirits business, has become the latest victim of a false advertising suit, based largely on a Bloomberg article and video in which I appear.

In the Bloomberg video, the reporter goes to the Anderson County Sheriff's office in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, to ask for directions to the Bulleit Distilling Company. The receptionist, gamely going along with the stunt, informs him that there is no such company with an address in Lawrenceburg. This seemingly contradicts the label reproduced above.

The label is not false.

Beyond a doubt, all or most of the whiskey in the bottle to which that label was affixed was distilled at a distillery in Lawrenceburg that was temporarily operating as the Bulleit Distilling Co., but which normally goes by the name Four Roses. It was a contract distilling job. The spirit was owned by Diageo, which owns Bulleit, the moment it was made. After distillation, it was taken in tankers to the cistern room at Diageo's Stitzel-Weller Distillery in Shively, south of Louisville, where it was barreled and then put away in one of the Stitzel-Weller warehouses. After aging, it was bottled by Diageo at their Plainfield, Illinois facility and distributed from there.

Except for the distilling claim, every other claim in the paragraph above should probably have the words 'most likely' in front of it, because excessively secretive Diageo won't confirm the other facts, but they are widely known and believed to be true. Diageo did, for many years, assert that every drop of Bulleit Bourbon is made at Four Roses. They no longer do.

If you Google 'shingle' you'll mostly find information about a nasty skin condition. But shingles, meaning a sign that names and marks the location of a business, have a long and venerable history in the whiskey trade.

Back in the earliest days of commercial distilling, distilleries didn't make brands. They made whiskey which they sold to rectifiers who created the brands under which the whiskey was marketed. Sometimes, to assure a supply, these companies would contract with the distillery to make a certain amount. In those more literal times, it was standard practice for the distillery to hang up a shingle indicating who the customer was at any given moment. While they were running whiskey for the Old Handlebar Distilling Company, the shingle said 'Old Handlebar Distilling Company.'

Many distilleries had boxes full of these shingles, which they dutifully changed according to what they were producing for whom. Depending on who had capacity or the best price, many different distilleries might do duty as Old Handlebar. This tradition died out with Prohibition. Today, most distilleries make multiple brands. Some only make brands they own, but others also do contract production. All of the non-distiller producer (NDP) products out there have to come from somewhere.

An assumed business name or DBA (for 'doing business as') might be called a legal fiction, but it is legal. While the Kentucky River Distillery is making whiskey under a contract with the Old Handlebar Distilling Company it is doing business as the Old Handlebar Distilling Company.

So the idea that Four Roses was acting as the Bulleit Distilling Company when it was fulfilling its production contract with Diageo is neither unique nor shady. It is a long established practice in many businesses.

But that doesn't entirely let Diageo off the hook. Two things.

Although both Diageo and Kirin (Four Roses) were always very secretive about the details of their contract, it became apparent about ten years ago that Four Roses wasn't producing enough whiskey for Diageo to account for all of the Bulleit Bourbon Diageo was selling. It also became known that Brown-Forman, Barton, and Jim Beam were all producing large quantities of spirit for Diageo, all of which was being aged at Stitzel-Weller.

Diageo had other needs for bourbon distillate, so there is no way to prove that any of that whiskey was being used for Bulleit, but it sure seemed likely that someone other than Four Roses was producing some of what became Bulleit Bourbon.

At about the same time, a source close to Four Roses reported that lab tests performed by Kirin confirmed that Bulleit contained whiskey not produced at Four Roses. This caused Four Roses to withdraw from an event in which it had earlier agreed to participate. While this was all very plausible and a lot of people knew about it, the original source clammed up and it became impossible to get confirmation so I never reported any of this widely and only do so now with all of the caveats above.

Finally, early last year, it became known that the Four Roses contract with Diageo had ended on December 31, 2013, and Four Roses was no longer producing any whiskey for Diageo, for Bulleit or any other brand. That fact obviously doesn't affect the label above, or any Bulleit bourbon that is being sold today, since that whiskey was distilled years ago. At some point a few years hence, none of the whiskey in a Bulleit Bourbon bottle will have been distilled in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, and the label will have to change. Right now it's true.

Today, most of the big bourbon distilleries are running at capacity. Brown-Forman, long the favorite contract distiller for other big distilleries, announced that as of January 1, 2015, it would only be distilling for itself. No more contracts.

Other distillers still do contract distilling, mostly via long-term agreements, but other than MGP in Indiana, most have no more capacity so while existing contracts will be fulfilled, NDPs are finding it hard to grow because they can't increase their orders. New Riff, a relatively new distillery in Newport, Kentucky, is picking up some of the slack. Michter's has solved the problem by building a new distillery in Shively, which they should be firing up any day now. Willet, in Bardstown, has been distilling for about two years. Diageo, too, is building a distillery in Kentucky but it is more than a year away from completion.

I don't like all the time having to guess what Diageo is really up to. Transparent they are not. In that regard they are out of step with the other majors, as well as the growing legions of small distillers, who are generally very open and eager to answer every question. Even in their statements about the Bulleit lawsuit, Diageo didn't claim the label was true, they claimed it was legal. The Big Galoot, as I sometimes call Diageo, still has a lot to learn about what American whiskey fans want and expect. If it takes a lawsuit to knock a little of the arrogance off of them, that wouldn't be a bad thing, but I'm not holding my breath.

The 'Other' Warehouse at Buffalo Trace

My fondness for Weller 12 is well-known and since it has been in such short supply lately, I was deeply moved when I spotted a whole pallet last week at Buffalo Trace. Let's hope it is on its way to a bar or liquor store near you.

In the whiskey world, we talk a lot about warehouses, and almost all of the time we mean those buildings where they keep the barrels full of aging whiskey. This is not about that kind of warehouse.

This is about the finished goods warehouse, sometimes called the distribution center (DC). That's where the products go from the bottling line. There cases are stacked on pallets, shrink-wrapped, and put away. Hopefully they won't be there for long, but will be drawn out for shipment to a distributor. This picture was taken (by Mark Gillespie) last Wednesday, so it's possible this pallet of Weller wonderfulness is already on a truck, making its way to thirsty Weller drinkers.

While Weller and I are having our moment, I am actually standing between the present and future of distilled spirits DCs. In the direction I'm facing is the current paradigm. It's a big, open space in which cases of spirits, shrink-wrapped on pallets, stand in neat-ish rows. Sazerac has warehouses like this at each of its bottling facilities, the largest of which is in Owensboro, at what used to be the Glenmore Distillery. The shrink-wrapped pallet-loads are put away with forklifts. Later, when they show up on an order, another forklift retrieves the load and takes it to a truck.

Each pallet is identified by a bar code that is scanned as it moves through the system. Every putaway space has an address. Theoretically, things can't get lost but if you show up at the right address and the product you want isn't there, you're pretty much screwed.

Behind me is the new paradigm, an automated system. The one at Buffalo Trace is brand new. The concept isn't new. I've seen them for many other industries, from auto parts to pharmaceuticals, but this is the first one I've seen at a bourbon distillery. There may be others. The DC is usually not on the tour.

When we think about our favorite whiskey makers, we mostly think about the whiskeys they make, but most of them make more than just whiskey. Buffalo Trace produces just about everything. American whiskey, of course, is made on site from scratch. Other products, such as liqueurs, are mixed from their component parts and bottled there. Still others, such as foreign whiskey, vodka, rum, and tequila, are made elsewhere and simply bottled there. It's hundreds, maybe thousands, of different products. Most are produced in a range of sizes. It's a lot to keep straight.

Almost everything leaves the site in bottles, packed into cardboard shipping cases, by way of the DC.

The first thing you notice about the new section of the DC is its height, about four times higher than the highest stacks in the old part. Instead of open space it is a matrix of shelves. Think of them as rows and columns in a three dimensional spreadsheet. It's mostly dark. The system doesn't need to see.

Compared to the traditional DC, it's a much better use of space. The other thing is that everything that happens within the system is done by machines. Conveyors move each load to the right section and an automated forklift swiftly puts it away. Everything is identified by chips and bar codes. It can run 24-hours a day if necessary. The brain knows exactly where everything is all the time.

It uses less labor, of course, but with the way Sazerac is growing, nobody is losing their job. It's faster, safer, more efficient, more reliable, and more secure. All new production is going into the new warehouse. When the current space is emptied, it will be used to store things like bottles and labels. The space where those materials are stored now probably will become another expansion of the visitor's center.

It takes a minimum of 12 years to make Weller 12 but when the whiskey is ready, you want there to be as little as possible between it and you. That's what this new DC is all about.

(Photograph by Mark Gillespie.)

Got a Cool Old Bottle to Sell? Try North Carolina

The North Carolina Senate Finance Committee passed House Bill 909 last week, which will make several significant changes to North Carolina alcoholic beverage control ("ABC") laws. House Bill 909 now heads to the full Senate for a vote. If it passes the Senate, it will be presented to the Governor for signature and will become effective immediately thereafter.

Here are the two sections that caught my eye.

Section 1 - Antique Spirituous Liquor

The bill allows restaurants, bars, and other entities holding mixed beverage permits to obtain antique spirituous liquor permits and sell antique spirituous liquor to customers. Antique spirituous liquor is liquor that has not been produced or bottled in more than twenty years, is unopened, and is not owned by a distillery. The bill provides a means for retailers to purchase antique spirituous liquor from local ABC Boards, which will purchase the antique liquor from private sellers. This process will enable retailers to obtain mixed beverage tax stamps and pay taxes on antique spirituous liquor, just as they do for other types of liquor. The North Carolina ABC Commission will adopt temporary rules by 1 September 2015 to outline this process.
_____________________

I have some questions about details, such as is a bottle of A. H. Hirsch gold foil, distilled in 1974, bottled in 2003, considered 41-years-old or 12-years-old? If it was removed from wood more than 20 years ago, does that count? I suspect the rule will be interpreted as 'bottled.' The wording also suggests that pre-1995 Old Grand-Dad won't be allowed, since Old Grand-Dad is still produced. Or how about Very Very Old Fitzgerald? Old Fitzgerald is still produced but it has been more than 20 years since VVOF was.

I know of no state that has this type of law in effect.
_____________________

Section 4 - Distillery Sales

The bill allows distilleries producing less than 100,000 gallons per year to sell one bottle of liquor per calendar year to each visitor to the distillery. This is a change from current law, which allows only ABC stores to sell bottles of liquor. Sales of bottles of liquor at the distillery shall be at the same price as sales at ABC stores, including the same taxes. Distilleries will remit applicable taxes to the North Carolina Department of Revenue. Bottles will have labels stating "North Carolina Distillery Tour Commemorative Spirit." The bill would allow each visitor to purchase one bottle of spirituous liquor per calendar year. Distilleries will be required to maintain electronic records verifying visitor purchases.

___________________

This is similar to the way sale at the distilleries was first legalized in Kentucky and Tennessee, including the labeling requirement as a 'commemorative' product. It is looser now. The limit in Kentucky now is three liters per person per visit.

The new law surely is not everything North Carolina distillers want, but it's a start, and it's interesting to see how a control state handles this sort of thing.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no distilleries in North Carolina that produce 100,000 gallons or more per year, but why should they be excluded?

Where Do They Keep Finding More Stitzel-Weller Whiskey?

The whiskey enthusiast universe is terribly excited about a new label Heaven Hill just had approved for an Old Fitzgerald line extension, a 20-year-old bourbon called "J.E.F." (John Fitzgerald's initials). The excitement is because of these words on the back label (shown above): "Distilled by Stitzel-Weller Distillery DSP-KY-16, Shively, KY, and Bottled by Heaven Hill Distilleries DSP-KY-31, Bardstown, KY."

This is all we know. Heaven Hill isn't talking about it yet. Label approvals don't necessarily mean a product is coming out, although they obviously have the whiskey or they wouldn't have submitted it. How is that possible, many have wondered, since the youngest Stitzel-Weller whiskey in existence is 23 years old, as the plant stopped distilling in 1992?

First, age statements on whiskey labels are allowed to understate the actual product age. You can label 25-year-old whiskey as 20-years-old if you wish. That's perfectly legal. Second, it's no secret how Heaven Hill got Stitzel-Weller whiskey. They received a boatload of it from Diageo when they bought the Old Fitzgerald Brand in 1999. They probably had a few extra barrels that they allowed to keep aging, maybe until now, or maybe until they turned 20, at which point they were transferred to stainless steel drums to stop them from aging any further.

American whiskeys aged 20 years or more are a minor part of the business. Their volume is almost too low to make them viable unless the price is astronomical, which this one might well be, so magical is the Stitzel-Weller name. Heaven Hill has a habit of underpricing its products, a habit it has been trying to break at least with regard to its top line offerings. I'm guessing this will be in line with its 20+ year-old Rittenhouse Ryes of a few years ago, about $150 for a 750ml bottle. You may have noticed that the only label submitted for the J.E.F. product is for the 375ml size, so a $70 MSRP wouldn't surprise me.

In the blogosphere, statements that such-and-such a thing is possible turn into 'facts' in an instant. This is sure to happen with this product since people will immediately start saying it's "the same as Pappy Van Winkle." (There are reasons it's not.) All we know about J.E.F. at this point is what is on the approved label and what we can logically surmise from that information. Don't believe anything else you hear about it unless it comes from Heaven Hill.

Wherein I Talk to Bloomberg About NDPs

I did this interview last summer. I recall it was a hot day and we had to turn off the AC at Scofflaw (3201 W Armitage) because it was too noisy. Bloomberg posted the finished five-minute video today with a story headlined "Bourbon Bait and Switch. What's Really in Your Glass?" I don't know if the video has seen the light of day before now, but this is the first time I've seen it. I should lose some weight.

Be sure to read the short article too. It's a little more up-to-date, noting that Four Roses stopped making Bulleit Bourbon at the beginning of last year. Bloomberg did a good job with both the article and video.

Between articles like this one, and excerpts and reviews of Reid Mitenbuler's new book, Bourbon Empire, the popular press is once again all abuzz with shocking news about non-distiller producers (NDPs) and the misleading tales they tell. Of course, none of this is news to regular readers of this blog, my newsletter, or my books, particularly my most recent one, Bourbon, Strange, which was published in September of 2014. The media likes to hype as 'unknown' information that is well known, just not widely known. You know better.

Despite the publicity, there are more Potemkin Distilleries today than ever. Why? Because stories sell and making them up is cheap, certainly cheaper than actually building a distillery and making whiskey yourself. I don't favor more regulation of labels, although the regulators need to do a much better job applying and enforcing the rules they already have. Many Potemkins break with impunity the rules about identifying the state where the whiskey was distilled, and about how old the whiskey really is if it is less than four years old.

For other things, consumer education is the best solution. If the consumer knows Templeton Rye is made in Indiana, not Iowa, and buys it anyway, no one is harmed.

But getting true information to the people who need it is hard. When you're not spending money making whiskey, you have a lot more to spend on marketing and most whiskey consumers get most of their information from the marketers, either directly or indirectly through bars and liquor stores.

If consumers are to be educated, they have to play their part too. Much would be solved if more people were just a little more curious about where the products they buy really come from, although I'm sure many of us are afraid to know. In today's multiple-channel media universe, multiple-channel messaging is the only way to reach a large number of people. Accurate information about American whiskey is available here and elsewhere if people bother to look for it, but an outlet like Bloomberg can put it in front of many more whiskey buyers than I can. In this case, both the story and video are original reporting too, not just a rehash of other published media reports like most of what you read today online.

Enthusiast publications such as WHISKY Magazine and Whisky Advocate do a good job, even though they are supported by whiskey advertising. The people who write for them as well as their many very knowledgeable readers won't stand for any whitewashing. Whether it is them or the fat guy in the red shirt, all any of us has is our credibility. If you want to know the truth about what you are drinking, your best bet is to get your information from a variety of sources and stay at least a little bit skeptical about all of them.

Owner and Injured Distiller Sue Still Maker Over Deadly Silver Trail Explosion

WPSD-TV, the NBC affiliate in Paducah, Kentucky, is reporting today that Silver Trail Distillery owner Spencer Balentine and Jay Rogers, one of the employees injured in the distillery accident on April 24, are jointly suing Oregon still maker Revenoor for damages.

The family of Kyle Rogers, 27, who died from injuries he received in the explosion, has not yet decided how they want to proceed.

On Thursday, Amanda Powell, Silver Trail Museum Manager, issued a public statement to other owners of Revenoor stills. "DO NOT operate until you have spoken with the Kentucky State Fire Marshal's office in Frankfort," she warned. "The model 300 gallon Revenoor used by Silver Trail failed massively, hurtling 50 feet and bending a 10' X 10' sliding steel door before landing in the gravel lot." Jay Rogers said the explosion was totally without warning and occurred four gallons into a normal run.

In her statement, Powell also made allegations about the Revenoor Company and its owner, Terry Wilhelm of Yamhill, Oregon. "The very day of the accident Mr. Wilhelm began placing Revenoor Stills into bankruptcy and pulled the website down according to the insurance investigation," she claimed.

In an interview with Mark Gillespie on Friday, Wilhelm denied Powell's assertions. “I started to pull the website and the phone number down on February 24th, not the day after the explosion," Wilhelm told Gillespie. "There hasn’t been anything done about a bankruptcy filing. I simply did it because there were some health and some personal family issues that were just getting to be too much along with the work with Revenoor. I simply wasn’t in a good mind to take any more orders."

An archived copy of the Revenoor web site can be seen here.

According to Gillespie, Wilhelm shut the business down because of a family dispute over ownership. Wilhelm told Gillespie that he has been locked out of the Revenoor shop on the family’s farm since February 23 with no access to the company’s equipment or records. Wilhelm also said that he has not been contacted by anyone associated with the Kentucky Fire Marshal and is willing to cooperate fully in the investigation.

A few days after the blast, Hawkins Teague reported in the Murray (Kentucky) Ledger & Times that Bill Compton, a deputy with the Office of the State Fire Marshal’s hazardous materials division, is overseeing the investigation. His office is working with Silver Trail’s insurance company to develop a theory of what exactly caused the equipment failure.

“It’s an ongoing investigation,” Compton said. “There was a catastrophic failure of the still, which caused the still to be catapulted through the building and into the gravel driveway of the facility. What exactly caused the still to over-pressurize and fail, at this point, we don’t know; it’s still under investigation.”

A final report is not expected for some time, Compton told Teague.

There have been a handful of accidents at American micro-distilleries in the last ten years, but no deaths or serious injuries until Silver Trail. The Kentucky Distiller's Association has established a support fund for Jay Rogers and the family of Kyle Rogers called 'Lifting Spirits.'