In this golden age of bourbon, drinkers are treated to (and charged a lot for) a slew of special releases, one-of-a-kind sips designed for savoring and, often, black market selling. Historically, Maker’s Mark has avoided the fray by sticking to its modest three-product line including Maker’s Mark, Maker’s 46 and Maker’s Mark Cask Strength bourbons. Its retired president, Bill Samuels Jr., wanted it that way because, like his father, he believed the fewer products one has to manage, the higher the quality.
Yet a few years ago Samuels relented to pressure from the Maker’s team to do something no other distillery had done: Let retail customers create customized, single-barrel blends of Maker’s 46. Unlike a common barrel pick, where customers choose a single barrel to be bottled for one operation, these one-off blends would be created from cask strength (111 proof) barrels of Maker’s 46. Each unique barrel would be finished for nine weeks using the retailer’s choice of French and American wood staves added to amplify flavors in the base whiskey. (By law, bourbon is made only from American oak. Whether a secondary wood or cask is used for finishing it is not limited by law.) The end product would be bottled and sold only at that retail outlet, restaurant or bar. The program would be called Maker’s Mark Private Select.
“Just doing customer barrel picks isn’t terribly interesting at a distillery that focuses so much on being consistent barrel to barrel,” said Maker’s Mark maturation specialist Jane Bowie. “But even though this is very different, we’re very careful here to respect the history of the bourbon the company is built on.”
In late 2015, Keeneland was selected to blend barrel No. 1. Five executives from the racetrack visited the distillery at Loretto, Kentucky, and blended a batch with Bowie’s guidance. It turned out so well that Samuels Jr., a man known for frankness, not feigned praise, was amazed at the result.
“He thought it tasted better than 46,” said Bryan O’Shields, managing director of Keeneland Hospitality. “To hear him say it bested 46 told us we’d done something right.”
Their enjoyment of it also showed Bowie that Maker’s was onto something others would love.
“When a customer gets a say in what the whiskey should taste like, they become highly engaged,” Bowie said. Private Select customers have included just a few tasters to as many as 12. “There’s no shortage of passion when they discuss what they like. You think they’re going to get into an argument, but they’re really having fun.”
Including Keeneland’s bottling, launched during the spring 2016 meet, Malone’s and the Marriott Griffin Gate also are serving their Private Select bottlings. Of that trio, only the Marriott has a license to sell its bottles for $95 each. (By comparison, the per-bottle price was $75 at Louisville retailer Westport Whiskey & Wine — before they sold out in one week.)
The Blend Game
On a long conference table in the distillery’s tasting room is a forest of glassware organized on labeled tasting mats. Each taster has nine glasses; three are empty, five bear tastes of Maker’s Mark 46 expressions and one has a splash of Maker’s Cask Strength for a sort-of neutral bourbon reference. In detail, Bowie explains the influence of each unique stave on the whiskey. For example, Baked American Pure adds vanilla and caramel depths, while Toasted French Spice adds smoke and baking spice flavors. All are dried using a variety of heat sources (sunlight, gas heat, infrared) and drying times (minutes, hours or days) to extract maximum flavor.
Once tasters have sipped and sniffed each expression for reference, large glass beakers of those expressions are brought to the table. Tasters then create unique blends by measuring amounts in graduated cylinders and pouring them into an empty flask to blend it. Each 10 milliliter part of the blend is represented by a colored wood chip engraved with that specific Maker’s 46 stave expression. The blend is poured for each taster, critiqued, noted and the panel tries again. Bowie recommends panels try at least three blends, though they usually concoct five or more. She’s calculated that there are 1,001 possible combinations.
Marriott Griffin Gate general manager Theona Simbrat handpicked 11 other tasters to accompany her to Loretto to blend the hotel’s barrel.
“The only requirement was that [these staffers] be passionate about bourbon,” Simbrat said.
The crew was divided into two groups, which each settled on their own blends. But when each group tasted the other’s, they stuck with their own. To break the tie, Bowie led them to taste each blend blind.
“We couldn’t decide, and at one point we threatened to start arm wrestling,” said Simbrat. “We had a great time doing it. Who’d have thought you could start drinking bourbon at 8 in the morning and you still feel good at 4?”
Simbrat said she’s also sipped Malone’s and Keeneland’s blends, “and ours is winning in my mind.”
Two years ago Marriott national launched an initiative to educate bartenders at 250 of its corporate properties on the particulars of bourbon, and how to make clever bourbon cocktails. According to Simbrat, about 750 Marriott bartenders have received the training.
“Griffin Gate has become the headquarters for bourbon,” she said. “They look to us to roll those things out first.”
O’Shields said that every bar at Keeneland has its Private Select bottles on the shelf, and that during the spring meet it will be offered in a special blood orange old fashioned served in a commemorative glass. To raise the quality of the track’s cocktail program, he said all cocktail juices are now fresh squeezed and all bars use proper ice.
“It’s an ultra-premium bourbon, and we want to make that known to guests,” he said. “We have every single bourbon produced anywhere in this region, but there’s something special about Maker’s that people want and seek out. And we’re selling a lot of this one so far.”
Since Maker’s Mark’s rickhouses aren’t climate controlled, it produces Private Select barrels only from October through February, when cool weather limits interaction with the barrel’s wood. The selected staves, however, dangle freely from a hoop inside the private barrel, which exposes both sides of their wood to the whiskey.
This means such limited production may frustrate drinkers who can’t find Private Select bottles. As of this past February, fewer than 50 private barrels were produced. They will yield around 12,000 bottles or roughly 1,300 nine-bottle cases. That’s a drop in the 9 million-case ocean of bourbon produced in Kentucky each year, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. Worse, many of those first barrels are going to restaurants and bars that lack a package sale license.
Maker’s is working on the issue, however, by carving a cave into a hillside within sight of the distillery. Inside those rock walls the temperature will stay at a steady 58 degrees, ideal for a nine-week aging of Private Select.
But while the distillery will not discuss the cave publicly, Samuels Jr. told Business Lexington in January that the excavation was going slower than expected. Burrowing into limestone requires careful work with the sometimes crumbling rock.
“It’s not a matter of just drilling in and making a giant hole,” Samuels Jr., said. “You have to go at it horizontally, almost like going with the grain.
“Hell, yeah, I wish it would go faster. But we’ll figure a way out.”