Mixin' Whiskies

On Friday I will have a story in the San Francisco Chronicle on single-barrel whiskies. It is one of those stories that has a simple theme- single-barrel programs are getting more popular- but the research for it lead me down a rabbit hole trying to find out which distillers were doing which programs and which venues in San Francisco participated in them. And everyone was on vacation so I had make about 4 calls for every one callback. In the end I probably spent half a month working on a story that won't pay for 1/5 of my monthly expenses. Oops, I'm dumb!

Anyway, the point of writing this blog entry is to share a thought that didn't make it into the article.

I think most people think of whiskey as something that is finished once it hits the barrel, then a few years later you open up the barrel and mix it with some other similar barrels and bottle it. If this were true, you could buy a single barrel of any whiskey. Unless I'm thinking hard about it, I particularly think of bourbon as a finished product in the barrel- probably because without the single-malt labels of scotch and with the small-batch labels of bourbons it's easy to picture it that way.

But if an American whiskey is not available in single-barrel form, there's a good chance that it's a mixture of different types of whiskies from the warehouse- some with more corn, some with more rye, etc. So all the multitudes of brands that come out of the very few distilleries in Kentucky are just different combinations of barrels at different price points.

When you think of barrels of whiskey as ingredients, rather than finished products, I think it takes away some of the magic. It doesn't change how they taste, of course, but increasingly it's important to remind ourselves what's reality and what's marketing.

Labels: whisky