Last year, you had 100 too: 50 that leaned sweet, and 50 that leaned spicy. You’re making a 7-year-old bourbon, and you have 100 barrels at 7 years of age. While brand ambassadors would love for us to think otherwise, every barrel of whiskey tastes a little different, and the art of making a familiar product (or not) is in how you combine barrels. Call it mingling, blending, marrying-they’re all words for the same process of gathering a number of barrels together to make a unified whiskey in a volume that will (hopefully) meet demand.īut batching is, more than anything, the way distilleries deal with something most whiskey drinkers will never hear them say out loud: flavor drift.įlavor drift, simply put, is the tendency of whiskey to not always taste the same, batch to batch, year to year. Everything-short of a single barrel-is batched in some way. Instead, distillers rely on the process of batching to pull a group of barrels together that taste the way the final product is supposed to taste: a little spicy, with an appropriate amount of caramel and all the other expected flavor notes.īatching is an essential part of the whiskey making process. If they were, the taste of the first and second bottles you bought would likely vary greatly, sometimes spicy, sometimes loaded with caramel sweetness. Booker’s Shiny Barrel Batch.Ĭontrary to the belief of many a whiskey drinker, there is no magic pipeline going straight into the bottling room, and barrels are not dumped endlessly into it day after day. But as I searched for some criteria to differentiate Granny’s batch from Teresa’s, Kitchen Table from Country Ham, it became clear that the question was deeper than what I was going to pull up online. Fumbling, I started reading off proof points, before heading to google in search of some tasting breakdowns. I’ve been on several Booker’s Roundtable tasting panels, and I’ve consumed the stuff professionally for years, but there I was-stumped. ![]() It caught me off guard momentarily that a guy who loves this product wouldn’t necessarily know these things, but in the moment both Cameron and I were stumped. Flush with a substantial collection of recent releases, I pridefully asked the obvious question, “which one?”Ĭameron studied the shelf for a moment, before turning to me and asking what turned out to be a far more obvious question, “what’s the difference?” I asked him what he’d like to drink and, as expected, he said Booker’s. It’s a good thing to have a friend who loves a whiskey you can actually buy, and so for the last few years I’ve always celebrated birthdays and milestones with a quick trip to the store to pick up a bottle.īut a peculiar thing happened a few months ago when he was over at my place after a long work week. Truth be told, everyone should be a Booker’s lover, but for Cameron, Booker’s was the first great whiskey he ever tried. What’s the difference between batch one and batch two of that whiskey you’re searching for, and should you care? Bourbon Review asked the best whiskey makers to find out. ![]() Heaven Hill Larceny and Elijah Craig Barrel Proof.
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