Picking a Knob Creek Single Barrel at Jim Beam
Store picks, the latest bourbon craze.
If you’ve read some of my recent bourbon reviews, you know that I’m a pretty big fan of store pick single barrels. A few years ago, store pick bourbons were a bit of a secret. While most bourbon enthusiasts, collectors, and flippers were focused on Pappy, BTAC, and other limited release bourbons (which they still are, of course), store picks were the unsung hero of the bourbon world—whiskey that you could easily find at a reasonable price that was often amongst the best America had to offer. These days, the collectors and flippers have caught on. Store picks now are often flipped for profit, although you and I can still often obtain them at reasonable prices, so long as you act fast when a store gets their bottles.
Sometimes you have to act insanely fast. For instance, several stores in the Nashville area recently received single barrels of Old Weller Antique 107, and all of them sold out within a couple of days… if not hours (or even minutes, in at least one case). It’s becoming a nuisance, and I’ve begun to question whether hunting down the latest store pick is really worth the hassle (a topic for another day). Nonetheless, I stand by my statement that store picks are the best thing going on in the American whiskey scene right now—there are still store picks that stick to the shelves long enough to grab easily enough. Knob Creek, for instance.
Bourbon drinkers know that single barrel store picks can be great, but many people don’t really know much about the process of how these store picks come to exist. I too have wondered about the process of picking a single barrel. What’s it like to go on a barrel pick? Luckily for me, I recently had the privilege of going on a barrel pick trip with my friend Tarak, the owner of Elixir Spirits in Spring Hill, TN, to help pick a couple of Knob Creek single barrels, both a bourbon and a rye. So I thought I’d share my experiences.
We arrived at the Jim Beam campus in Clermont, KY mid-morning on a crisp and beautiful October day. Clermont, which is just down the road from Bardstown, is about a 2.5 hour drive from my home in Nashville. One of the reasons why Nashville liquor stores get so many good store picks is our proximity to the Kentucky distilleries—they are all only a day trip away. The Beam campus is one of the more lovely amongst Kentucky distilleries. While some of the big bourbon makers have facilities that make it obvious that whiskey is indeed an industrial product (Barton, for instance), Beam is nicely picturesque.
Upon arrival we immediately got down to business, boarding a shuttle bus which took us to Beam’s Warehouse K, where our six sample barrels—three bourbons and three ryes—were waiting for us. Beam only gives you the choice of three barrels per product—if you don’t like any of the three, well I guess you’re out of luck.
The first step toward selecting our whiskey was to open up our prospective barrels by removing the wooden bung that seals the bunghole. How exactly does one accomplish this? With a hammer, of course! Or more specifically, a wooden mallet. One of the experienced members of our group grabbed the mallet as soon as we walked into the warehouse and got to it, hitting the barrel on opposite sides next to the bung back and forth repeatedly until the alternating force brought the bung out of its hole. After a few quick and violent strikes, the job was done.
Since this was my first barrel pick (I believe I was the only “store pick virgin” on the trip), I got to go next. With my first few blows of the mallet to oak, I was a little afraid of breaking the barrel (a stupid thought in hindsight) and didn’t exert nearly enough force. “Harder!” everyone shouted. You really have to hit the hell out of the barrel to get that bung loose. After a handful of my best shots, the bung popped out.
After all six of the bungs were removed, our tour guide pulled out a whiskey thief (or valinch, as the Scots like to call it) and started pouring samples straight from the barrel. Each of the barrels was labelled by color—red, green, and blue. Two sets of three glasses were laid out for each of us (one set for bourbon, one for rye), with color coded markings to match the barrels so that we’d know which sample came from which barrel. Now came the fun part—nosing and tasting the whiskey! (OK, removing the bung was pretty fun too.)
We started with the three bourbon barrels. I won’t get too far into tasting notes here (in part because I didn’t write any down to save—dumb rookie mistake), but it was pretty interesting how different the three bourbons really were. In spite of being aged for a similar amount of time (all three bourbons were around 14 years old) in the same warehouse and in similar locations within the warehouse, all three barrels were distinctly different. This of course speaks to why so many whiskey drinkers have all fallen in love with store picks—they offer something apart from the norm of whiskey consistency. Our main goal was to pick a bourbon (and rye) that was distinct, rather than just another bottle of Knob Creek with little difference from their standard expression.
I started with the red sample, which was fairly one dimensional and boring. I was a bit disappointed… what if I didn’t like any of these barrels? The green, however, was rich, complex, and to my tastes, fairly unique. Whew, at least there would be one good option. I then moved on to blue, which I thought was merely OK at first, but after a bit of time began to grow on me. Nevertheless, I immediately liked green the best. I then went through all three samples again with a drop or two of water added. The water helped open up both the green and blue a good bit, but red was still flat. No doubt that it was between green and blue for me.
Most of our group took the initial part of the tasting privately, as the moment had quickly shifted from a jovial group outing to one of personal whiskey reflection. But after a few minutes, we began to discuss what we thought of the whiskey. Red was universally deemed as inferior to the other two barrels by most of the group, so it was indeed between green and blue.
Before making a final decision, we moved on to tasting the rye barrels. Just like the bourbons, the rye barrels were labeled red, green, and blue. I really enjoyed all three of the rye samples, and again was struck by how different they were. I could have gotten behind selecting any of the three ryes, but the blue barrel was the clear standout for me, as it was rich with butterscotch and layers of depth and spice.
After our initial round of tastings, we refilled our glasses between the contenders. At first I was afraid we’d only get one pour from each barrel, but it turned out that we were allowed additional fill-ups via the thief as we desired. I had eliminated the red bourbon, but wanted to retry the green and blue to confirm my initial judgment. After the second tasting, it was closer than I initially thought… blue was pretty good too. I debated internally, and took some more whiskey and water. Blue was good, but green was my choice.
The group began to deliberate and make a final pick, with Tarak surveying opinions from everyone. For the bourbons, the majority of us selected green, but there was also some strong support for blue. Ultimately it was Tarak’s decision as the store owner—he was the one putting down the money for the barrels after all—and he decided… both! He initially picked the green barrel, but after some adamant support for the blue barrel, he decided to buy both barrels. Why not? They were both good bourbons. As for the ryes, there was much less debate. The blue rye barrel was more or less unanimously agreed upon as the rye winner.
After pouring a little more whiskey to celebrate our picks, the final step was signing the heads of the winning barrels. We posed for a few pictures, took a few more gulps of delicious Kentucky gold, and before I knew it we had left Warehouse K behind. The whole thing was a bit of a whirlwind, as the time really flew by. Next it was on to a private tour of the Beam facilities.
The tour itself was pretty standard, with a brief overview of whiskey making from grain to mash to distillate, and the usual explanation of the barrel aging process. I’m not going to get into the details of the tour itself here, but I will say that the Beam tour is well worth taking if you happen to be passing by Clermont (it’s located just off of I-65, so it’s quite easy to get to). For that matter, it’s worth planning a weekend trip to Bardstown for a visit of multiple distilleries, with Beam being one not to miss.
Normally when a group picks a private Knob Creek barrel, the winning barrel gets bottled then and there, so you can immediately buy a bottle and take it home. Unfortunately due to a timing issue, we couldn’t have any of our barrels bottled the same day. Instead they will actually age a few more months until Beam can schedule a bottling date. It will be interesting to see how much the whiskey changes with a few more months of age.
Although we didn’t get to see our barrel get bottled, we did get to see the bottling line in action. Perhaps the most interesting part of the process is how they clean the bottles before filling them up with whiskey. The bottles are prepped for whiskey by cleaning them with… whiskey! Before each bottle gets its fill of the final product, they get a quick spray of bourbon for sanitization.
Where does this cleaning bourbon come from, you ask? I asked the same thing. The answer is that any time a single barrel bourbon is bottled, there is a little leftover whiskey that isn’t enough to fill an entire bottle. Rather than simply throw this whiskey away or into another product, Beam dumps it into a cleaning vat to cleanse the next batch of Knob Creek bottles. A fun part of the tour is that you get to try the cleaning process out for yourself, as a small cleaning machine is set up for visitors to clean their own bottles with a bourbon spray.
After bottling and labeling, the final step of the Knob Creek process is sealing the bottle in wax. This is done by hand dipping a freshly filled and labeled bottle into a large vat of gooey hot black wax. Once the wax dries, your bottle of Knob Creek is ready to go!
The barrels we picked haven’t arrived yet, they’re still aging in Warehouse K (or maybe somewhere else… I’m not sure what Beam did with them after we left). Once they are bottled, they will be sent to Elixir in Spring Hill, where they will probably sell fairly fast. Store picks often do these days. Once I get my bottles, I’ll be posting reviews of the final products, so stay tuned.
If you’d like to see more pictures from my Knob Creek trip, I’ve created a Facebook album with plenty more photos, including shots of the Beam production facilities. View the album by clicking here.
