One of the classic questions for a new distiller is what do you do while your whiskey ages? Many distillers buy other people’s whiskey, a little sleight of hand that they hope will be forgiven when the real whiskey comes. I always felt like this would be a bait and switch that might set us off on the wrong foot…and branding someone else’s whiskey - especially as somehow something we authored - was a nonstarter. Never mind what to do about the inevitable flavor shift? It just didn’t make sense for us (though is remarkably common in whiskey and booze in general).
Other distillers use gin and vodka to bridge the gap. A lot of those spirits start with outside distilleries as well and I’m a whiskey guy and didn’t really have anything to contribute to the world of gin or vodka. Also, as an Appalachian Kentuckian–a distinction with meaning to Kentuckians only maybe–I was pretty interested in whiskey off the still, what I called moonshine.
Moonshine: America's original rebel spirit
In Defense of Moonshine
Now in those days, the ripe old days at the headwaters of the bourbon boom, moonshine was pretty frowned on. In fact, there was disagreement over what unaged whiskey should be called. Some felt calling it moonshine, which most commonly means illegal spirit, shouldn’t apply. They might have preferred white dog or white whiskey. There was hand-wringing in the New York-based whiskey media. But where I grew up, unadulterated distillate intended for consumption was called moonshine and any urban journalist trying to say otherwise probably were off their beat. Le Monde doesn’t try to define tacos.
Silver tequila isn’t thought of as inferior to reposado or anejo, so why should unaged whiskey be looked down on? It’s a purely arbitrary cultural trope. I always liked whiskey plata even if the commentariat wanted their superaged bourbons (when they weren’t that hard to get). We made moonshine and watched the price of middling bourbon tick up as people chased age statements and bottles that companies told us were very special, if perhaps, not always as rare as they claimed. Artificial rarity began to be confused with true rarity).
I acknowledge there were plenty of people who were just not that interested in white whiskey by any name, people who bought into centuries of marketing, or maybe I’ll be generous and allow that they weren’t that into white spirits. Though don’t let me catch such a person with a silver tequila, as hypocrisy is in poor taste.
Kings County Distillery's 10 Year 'Hazmat' Barrel Strength Bourbon
Age Isn't the Same as Quality
Kings County really began with the premise that we made good zero-year-old whiskey and that when we had 1+ and 2+ year and 4+ year and so on, the apples to apples comparison would show well. That fundamental gambit has paid off, as we released our first decade-old whiskey last year. And while we have inventory set aside for older whiskeys, we will have a hard time competing on age with industrial Kentucky distillers that sit on inventories of barrels into the millions.
With fundamental shifts in the whiskey business, age may no longer communicate the one thing that has been constant for the last 15 years: rarity. Decade old Kentucky bourbon, which might have sold by the barrel to independent bottlers for $10,000 in 2023 are worth less than a thousand today. The correlations between age and price has been strong for years, and has drowned out any other other production factor.
I’ve actually heard people who profess themselves to be bourbon connoisseurs say that $10 per year is fair shelf pricing for bourbon as though there were no other considerations. If you can do basic arithmetic, you too can be a whiskey expert.
Much of that thinking was for people interested in Kentucky bourbon and looking for rarity but not quite excellence. Those looking for excellence often found it pretty readily, with and without age statements, but not always especially impressive ones–and not often expensive bottles. It takes paying north of $200 for middling whiskey to cure one’s self of chasing rarity over excellence.
Beyond The Age Statement
Kings County has always offered a very different value proposition. Always rare (we sell less worldwide than Pappy Van Winkle if we want to talk numbers), and now aged commensurate with most mainline brands, our whiskeys derive more of their character from organic ingredients, pot distillation in batches, premium cooperage in a variety of formats, traditional methods.
You can taste this difference. It’s a richness of texture that you can’t achieve on a column still and a complexity of flavor that depends on the endogenous enzymes found in a high-malt mash bill and an open fermentation. These are very specific differences that have nothing to do with age, and can be tasted in our unaged and young distillates all the way through to our our syrupy, highly coveted barrel-strength whiskeys, which have the texture and flavor heft to hold up at high proof when commercial barrel proofs break down into solventy alcohol-forward drams that have more in common with cough syrup than whiskey.
The Barrel Room
The Cult of More
Age is of course important in whiskey, especially if you like bold vs. delicate, rich vs. balanced, or oak vs. other notes. I think of age as a series of these sliding scales, going from one flavor to another, neither right nor wrong. But palates have gone toward extremes: sriracha has replaced ketchup, hoppy IPAs have displaced pilseners, heavily peated scotches seem to have a significant advantage in audience over the merely peated. Foods are measured in IBUs and PPMs and if years of whiskey has its analog, it’s in this chasing of extremes.
I have a hazy memory of being at a whiskey event, being offered a pour of Garrison Brothers Cowboy Bourbon, surely one of most oak-forward, barrel-forward whiskeys on the globe, and, knowing it was only a 6-year, some casual connoisseur whispering in aside, “Think of what that will be like with a little more age on it.” Think of it indeed.
I was once asked, what I would change about Bourbon, and I said that we should abolish brands, but if that were a bridge too far, I actually think removing age statements would go a fair distance in humbling a lot of “experts” and opening up a lot of the whiskey world to other variables. But I’m not holding my breath.
A Thought Experiment
I don’t even really agree with my own thought experiment, since old whiskey is fun. I too am persuaded by the romance of old whiskey and I will do my best to steward a portion of our stocks toward a receding frontier of old age. There are other factors that make a whiskey great, even better, but there is no shortcut for time, and whiskey is an agricultural time capsule. It’s just fun and meaningful to drink something that has been around and seen the world change.
whiskey in action at the kings county distillery
The People Matter As Much As The Process
Still, one of my favorite tricks around the distillery is asking people to guess the age of samples that are engineered to be tricky: 3-year old whiskey from a 5-gallon barrels vs. 8-year used barrel bourbon-mash corn whiskey. In our whiskeys, age doesn’t determine what is good about a whiskey, we do. It’s the human hand that makes the difference in great whiskey, not age, and that is true in brands big and small, distillers in industrial or farmside settings.
The Black Label Treatment
That is why I’m always excited about our Black Label releases. They are superlative in so many ways: uncompromising, mature, and excellent in all the ways you could wish. I think they offer the most value, even at our prices, relative to commercial whiskey. Heaven Hill and Sazerac, both known for longer-aged American whiskeys, can’t go back and re-distill their 21-year old whiskeys in a pot still or to use organic ingredients after the fact. In a way, age is all they have as a point of differentiation and so everything comes down to the blender that selected them to age the distance. Kings County, by contrast, focuses on excellence at every stage, and it’s why our whiskeys stand out at every age.
We think the totality of our whiskeys, age included, is our value. But you can be the judge.
