Four roses

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Main building of the Four Roses distillery

Four Roses is an American bourbon whiskey brand that is made at the Four Roses Distillery in Lawrenceburg , Kentucky . Four Roses has been owned by the Kirin Brewery Company since 2002 .

Four Roses Bourbon is unusual because it is blended from a total of ten different straight bourbons made in the Lawrenceburg distillery. Most other bourbon distilleries only use one recipe for each whiskey and mix whiskeys of different ages and from different barrels to achieve a consistent taste. In addition to Four Roses, the distillery also produces whiskeys for blended whiskeys (such as the Seven Crown from Seagram’s ), and Bulleit whiskey for Diageo was also produced there at times . The name goes back to the Rose family who originally made Four Roses whiskey.

history

A distillery called Four Roses was founded in Kentucky in 1886 by members of the Rose family. In 1888 Paul Jones Jr. bought the brand and incorporated it into his business.

Jones, who lives in Georgia, was active in the alcohol and tobacco trade and already had a small distillery there. After Georgia banned alcohol in 1886, Jones moved to Louisville , Kentucky , then the center of bourbon production. Jones made Paul Jones Whiskey and Four Roses . In 1902 Jones merged his company with several other distillers to form the Frankfort Distillery , whose headquarters and distillery was in Frankfort , Kentucky. When alcohol sales were banned in the United States in 1920, the Frankfort Distillery (with the brands Old Oscar Pepper, Mattingly and More and Antique) had the license to sell "medicinal whiskey". At times, Frankfort Destillery sold a quarter of all alcohol sold in the United States.

After not only the sale of old stocks but also the production of medical whiskeys was allowed in 1928, Jones bought into the Stitzel-Weller Distillery , as Frankfort Distillery did not have its own distillery building. In the years after Prohibition, Four Roses was the best-selling bourbon in the United States. At the same time, the Canadian company Seagram began to buy into the US spirits market and, immediately after the end of Prohibition, set up a distillery in Lawrenceburg , Indiana , today's MGP Distillery, and in the following years bought up a dozen smaller US producers.

After the death of Lawrence Jones in 1943, Seagram bought Frankfort Distillers, which at the time owned a total of five different distilleries, including Four Roses and Old Prentice, in whose building Four Roses is now produced. At that time, the American distilleries were producing industrial alcohol for military use during World War II. After the end of World War II, Seagram centralized its production at the Indiana distillery and a distillery building they bought in Lawrenceburg , Kentucky - today's Four Roses Distillery. The fact that both distilleries were in places called Lawrenceburg created confusion and confusion throughout Seagram's existence.

Four Roses Straight Bourbon was an important brand, especially in the European and Japanese markets . Four Roses was the most popular bourbon brand in Europe and Japan after Jim Beam and Jack Daniel's and made the whiskey style known. In the USA itself, Four Roses only came onto the market as a very inexpensive blended whiskey and had a relatively bad reputation. Only in Kentucky and Indiana, in the regions around the Seagrams Distilleries, did the Yellow Label Straight Bourbon come into the shops so that at least the employees of the distilleries there could buy the Straight Bourbon.

After Vivendi took over the Seagram Group , the distillery was bought out in 2002 by a long-standing Seagram business partner of the Japanese Kirin Brewery Company . After straight bourbon was not available in the United States for forty years, Kirin reintroduced it there. There are several versions of the origin of the name, of which the distillery especially uses one with a romantic marriage proposal for its marketing. The name probably goes back to the Rose family who originally founded the distillery.

Distillery

Today's distillery building in Mission Revival style goes back to a previous building from 1818. Joe "OLd Joe" Payton built a distillery near what is now the Four Roses building. He sold this to the Hawkins family, who in turn built a first distillery building on the site of the Four Roses distillery in 1855 and named it and the whiskey distilled there Old Prentice . The distillery changed hands several times in the following decades before it burned down in 1909. The owners at the time, the Ripy brothers, rebuilt it and built the building that still exists today. The distillery and the former Old Joe distillery continued to change hands frequently and at times acted independently of each other and at times as one company. They ceased operations during Prohibition until they were bought by Seagram after World War II.

The current building has existed since 1910 and is on the National Register of Historic Places . The distillery was opened as Old Prentice Distillery, colloquially in the area it is still referred to as Old Prentice or Old Joe . It has only been called Four Roses since 1986. The appearance of the building is based on the Spanish mission stations of the 18th and early 19th centuries in California. Why the building was constructed in this style is unknown. Kentucky was never an area of ​​the Spanish Mission, and the style revival in the 19th and early 20th centuries was far removed from Kentucky in the American Southwest.

The distillery is just a few minutes' drive from the Wild Turkey distillery . Bottling and storage is located in Cox's Creek , Kentucky, about an hour's drive from Lawrenceburg. The whiskey warehouses that are right next to the Four Roses site actually belong to Wild Turkey. A visitor center and shop have also existed since 2004. The distillery is on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail .

Manufacturing

Bourbon distilleries usually have a recipe for bourbon and a grain mixture from which they distill the whiskey. To achieve the most constant taste possible, mix the whiskeys from different barrels, which may have been stored for different lengths of time, before filling the bourbon into bottles. The Four Roses Distillery takes a different approach by having several basic straight bourbon recipes and mixing these different straight bourbons together before bottling them as Four Roses.

Ten whiskeys are distilled from two different grain mixtures and five different yeasts, which are then stored separately in new American white oak barrels. The five yeast strains come from the five distilleries Seagram bought in 1943. While a grain mix (75% corn, 20% rye, 5% malt) is a corn / rye mix, which is relatively typical for bourbon, the other mix (60% corn, 35% rye, 5 % Malt) has a significantly higher proportion of rye, which gives the whiskey a stricter and heartier taste. Four Roses is the only major bourbon manufacturer whose warehouses only have one level in order to store all whiskeys as similarly as possible. This also makes it easier to load and unload the barrels. After five to ten years, the barrels are combined into different characters when they are bottled. Four Roses Whiskey usually consists of whiskeys that have been stored for 5½ to 10 years.

Products

Four Roses Whiskey

Four Roses produces both Kentucky Straight Bourbon and Blended Whiskey.

Six different types of whiskey are sold:

  • Yellow Label (40% alcohol, ages 5 to 6 years, made from all ten whiskeys produced by Four Roses)
  • Small batch 90 ° (The small batch consists of 19 drums on average.)
  • Single barrel 100 °
  • Single barrel 86 °
  • Platinum
  • Black label

Pernod Ricard has been a sales partner for the Four Roses Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey Yellow Label since 2002 and has also been represented on the German market with the Four Roses Single Barrel since July 2009.

The Four Roses distillery also produces Bulleit bourbon on behalf of Diageo .

literature

  • Al Young: Four Roses: The Return of a Whiskey Legend Butler Books 2010, ISBN 1-935497-29-4

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d C. K. Cowdery: Bourbon, Straight - The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey. Made and Bottled in Kentucky, Chicago, Illinois 2004, ISBN 0-9758703-0-0 , p. 127
  2. ^ A b Michael R. Veach: Frankfort Distillery Inc. in: John E. Kleber (ed.): The Kentucky Encyclopedia University Press of Kentucky ISBN 0-8131-2883-8
  3. ↑ a b c d CK Cowdery: Bourbon, Straight - The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey. Made and Bottled in Kentucky, Chicago, Illinois 2004, ISBN 0-9758703-0-0 , p. 128
  4. ^ A b Whiskey Nations, Dorling Kindersley Ltd, 2008 ISBN 1-4053-3624-2 , p. 190
  5. ↑ a b c Susan Reigler: Kentucky Bourbon Country: The Essential Travel Guide University Press of Kentucky, 2013 ISBN 0-8131-4270-9 , S. 114
  6. ↑ a b c CK Cowdery: Bourbon, Straight - The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey. Made and Bottled in Kentucky, Chicago, Illinois 2004, ISBN 0-9758703-0-0 , p. 126
  7. ↑ a b c CK Cowdery: Bourbon, Straight - The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey. Made and Bottled in Kentucky, Chicago, Illinois 2004, ISBN 0-9758703-0-0 , p. 131
  8. ↑ CK Cowdery: Bourbon, Straight - The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey. Made and Bottled in Kentucky, Chicago, Illinois 2004, ISBN 0-9758703-0-0 , p. 132
  9. ^ Franz Brandl : Whisk (e) y . Südwest Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-517-08335-3 , p. 202
  10. ↑ Susan Reigler: Kentucky Bourbon Country: The Essential Travel Guide University Press of Kentucky, 2013 ISBN 0-8131-4270-9 , S. 114
  11. ↑ CK Cowdery: Bourbon, Straight - The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey. Made and Bottled in Kentucky, Chicago, Illinois 2004, ISBN 0-9758703-0-0 , p. 69

Web links

Commons : Four Roses  - collection of images, videos and audio files