![]() ![]() ![]() And so on.Īs a new distillery with new equipment and lots of ideas about mash bills for our whisky, the Long Road team decided to offer a series of experimental whiskies that we call the Wayfarer’s Whisky Series. ![]() Wheat whisky must contain 51% or more wheat. Rye whisky must contain not less than 51% rye. Once you know the 51% rule, you can more easily define other whiskies, too. Bourbon with heavier doses of rye in the mash bill will have a bit more spice characteristic. Wheated Bourbon is known to hold up better over long stretches in a barrel. Wheat and Rye are often used as “flavoring” ingredients in bourbon, and Malted Barley almost always makes up a percentage of the mash bill to offer enzymes that aid in fermentation and flavor development. First adopted in 1935, the SIDS is where we get the definition above and the mandate that bourbon must have not less than 51% corn in the mash bill.Īlthough corn must be the predominant ingredient in a bourbon’s mash bill (recipe), most bourbon contains two or three other grains as well. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27, Part 5 – a chapter we as distillers refer to nearly every day. But, it wasn’t until the fall of Prohibition that the government finally laid out the Standard’s of Identity for Distilled Spirits (SIDS) – which is part of the U.S. And in the 1909 “Decision on Whisky”, President Taft determined that Bourbon Whisky must be made from a majority corn. To help guide the industry, the Federal government made several decisions around the end of the 19th century like the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 (to separate straight whiskies from blended whiskies) and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (that first regulated what could be called Bourbon). Once bourbon became popular, though, many people tried to pass their blended whisky or neutral spirits off as bourbon. When the early bourbon distillers of Kentucky began making whisky, corn was cheap and easy to come by. So, why corn? The simplest answer is “corn is what was available”. at not exceeding 80% alcohol by volume (160 proof) from a fermented mash of not less than 51 percent corn and stored at not more than 62.5% alcohol by volume (125 proof) in charred new oak containers. It may seem straight forward, but when you really dig into the Code of Federal Regulations (and the Beverage Alcohol Manual from the TTB, in particular), you learn there are 42 different “types” of whisky, all with different defining characteristics – but many that are VERY slight.įirst, as a bit of a refresher, recall that the legal definition of bourbon whisky, according to the TTB, is: For Part 3 of our “What is Bourbon” series, we look at the ingredients that make bourbon bourbon. ![]()
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