“Our role is to pinpoint and describe what the problem is,” says Master Blender Andrew MacKay. On the front end, the team tastes for off-notes and distillation errors. It has been largely up to Bulleit engineers to replicate many of the conditions the brand’s current distilling partners use, while giving the distillery and blending teams added enhancements to allow for better control over problem areas they frequently see in trying to distill whiskey with those signature flavors. But that’s where the new distillery is important. There are admittedly things you cannot change, like the greater structure of the still itself. We’ve asked distillers to change their cleaning schedules, to add in more cleaning, to install more equipment.” “Anything from dropping temperature, to how many days you ferment, to your condenser temperature. “We do the sensory analysis and we request still modifications to get those flavors,” Eboni explains. It’s exactly what we want, or we don’t take it.” That control has included standardizations and tweaks to everything about the whiskey-making process over the years, as Bulleit has set out to create continuity. We provide it to them, including the recipe, and it is made to our specifications. Everything from the grains, to the yeast, to the barrels–it’s all selected by us. “We purchase all the materials for the distillery. “Sourcing liquid is more of a partnership,” explains whiskey blender Eboni Major. Like many of the other spirits likely stocking your favorite bar, Bulleit started with sourcing its liquid as they planned how and where to build their own distillery.īulleit headed off many of the problems that could come from changing distilleries later by setting their own rigorous standards of quality. And like ovens, no two stills are exactly alike.Īt the moment, the brand’s bourbon is made in partnership with other distilleries (they aren’t allowed to reveal which ones due to contracts, but the internet is rife with information on what isn’t a very well-kept secret). In essence, you’re going from baking in someone else’s oven with their ingredients, to baking in your own oven with your own ingredients. When we think about distilleries making the change from sourced whiskey to house distillation, it’s a logical leap to assume that there will be a change to the final product. (Brian Bohannon/AP Images for Bulleit Distilling Co.) New Distilling Digs ribbon-cutting event, Tuesday, March 14, 2017, in Shelbyville, Ky. With this is mind, Bulleit invited The Bourbon Review to Shelbyville, Ky for a behind the scenes probe of their new distillery which opened in early 2017 and its leadership, and ask every question we could think of about how they’ll continue to produce the same whiskey in the future, so that the bottle you buy today will taste the same as the bottle you buy in a decade. But changing distilleries can be like playing the Super Bowl in another climate: it can drastically alter the outcome if you’re not prepared. It has become the first reached-for bottle of bartenders, and for many bourbon lovers, it is one of the most popular everyday bottles at home.īulleit is a few years away from a major milestone: making the switch from sourced whiskey to house distilled whiskey. Photography by Īs one of the most universally liked bourbons in the market today, Bulleit has distinguished itself among the competition in a comparably short time.
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