Booker's
Booker's is a bourbon whiskey from the Beam Suntory Group. At its launch in 1988 was Booker's first whiskey, known as Small Batch (dt .: Small lots was introduced) on the market. Booker's is selected once a year from a small number of selected barrels at the Jim Beam Distillery in Clermont and bottled straight from the barrel.
The whiskey is six to eight years old, its alcohol content is between 60% and 62.5%.
history
Booker's was created by Frederick Booker Noe II , grandson of Jim Beam and a Master Distiller at Jim Beam's Churchill Distillery for 40 years . According to tradition, Booker Noe always had a supply of specially selected bourbons from the best barrels of the Jim Beam warehouses to share with friends, family and guests. In 1987, the people in charge of Beam were looking for a special Christmas present for business partners and asked Booker Noe whether his supply would be enough for 1,000 bottles. The distillery filled 1,000 Chablis bottles that happened to be in the warehouse, had Booker Noe handwrite a label, and distributed the bottles with Booker's selection to business partners at Christmas. The label is still a reproduction of Booker's first handwritten label to this day.
The success of single malt whiskeys began at the end of the 1980s and Buffalo Trace , in response to this, introduced Blanton’s as a single barrel bourbon - bourbon from a single barrel - in 1984 and also found success with it. Single barrel bourbon was selling for $ 100 a bottle in Japan at the time, while normal bourbon from the US market barely fetched more than $ 20. The Beam management decided to respond with their own premium whiskey in limited numbers and to fall back on Booker's selection. To underline Booker's particular limitations, Beam invented the term Small Batch , which was intended to emphasize a small amount. Today, numerous distilleries use the term, while smaller manufacturers such as Maker's Mark or Woodford Reserve even refer to their entire production as small batch. In 1988 the first Booker's Small Batch Whiskey went on sale, with an edition of 6,000 bottles. In 1992 Jim Beam established a Small Batch Collection which also includes the Knob Creek , Basil Hayden and Baker's brands .
Manufacturing
Booker's, like any other beam whiskey, is distilled and stored in the Clermont warehouse. There are slightly different climatic conditions at each point and the wood of the barrels is not completely identical. Over the storage time, differences arise between the whiskeys in the individual barrels, which are normally compensated by blending whiskeys from different barrels. Beam selects barrels with particularly good whiskey for the Booker's and creates three possible Booker's batches. These barrels all come from the Clermont warehouses, usually from the older seven- to nine-story houses. Batch in this context means a blended tank full of whiskey, in which whiskey was filled from different barrels in order to fill it into bottles.
Small samples of the blends are given to Booker's son Fred Noe and three or four journalists, who then agree on one of the blends. A Booker's Batch is made from 360 barrels, which is sold out after about three months - then Beam makes the next batch. The whiskey is no longer processed after storage: it is neither diluted to drinking strength nor filtered cold. This is why it has an alcohol content of just over 60%, and Booker Noe himself recommended adding some water to it when drinking.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d F. Paul Pacult: American Still Life: The Jim Beam Story and the Making of the World's # 1 Bourbon John Wiley & Sons, 2011 ISBN 1118045688
- ↑ a b c d Chuck Cowdery : In Which I Help Pick Your Next Bottle of Booker's , The Chuck Cowdery Blog May 2, 2014