Beam Distilling has announced a new innovation from its esteemed Booker's brand: Booker's Bourbon The Reserves.
This is the first edition of the beer that will soon be released as an annual, commemorating eighth-generation master distiller Freddie Noe’s grandfather and the brand’s namesake, Booker Noe.
“It can take a while to find a liquid like this, but when I do, it feels like the great man himself picked them,” Freddie said in a press release. “I believe this is the kind of whiskey my grandfather would have made if he were still alive and with us.”
While this release is a tribute to Booker, Freddie’s fingerprints are all over this whiskey. While experimenting with different liquids and barrels at the Fred B. Noe Distillery on the James B. Beam campus in Clermont, KY, one word kept coming to Freddie’s mind: leftovers. With so many barrels lying around, he decided to combine the best possible flavor with what was already there.
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Freddie hand-selected eight batches of casks from distilleries of the following ages and warehouses:
- Eight years, two months, 12 days on the fourth floor of Warehouse G
- Eight tears, five months, 19 days, on the fifth floor of warehouse I
- Eight years, five months, 20 days on the fifth floor of Warehouse Z
- Nine years, two months, three days on the fifth floor of the Q warehouse
- Nine years, two months, four days on the sixth floor of Warehouse J
- Nine years, five months, 18 days on the seventh floor of warehouse H
- 10 Years, three months, two days On the fourth floor of warehouse X
- 14 years, four months, 16 days, on the sixth floor of the First Warehouse
Sitting across from Freddie in the Noe Distillery tasting room, I took my first taste of the bourbon. The whiskey had notes of dried fruit and brown sugar on the nose. As I sipped, classic yet complex notes of vanilla and charred oak spread across my palate. Upon swallowing, a long, lingering finish left notes of baking spice on my tongue.
Despite being a warm whiskey—125.9 degrees—it was well-rounded and smooth. Freddie attributes this lack of burn to the fact that he selects barrels from the middle third of each warehouse, “the sweet spot,” as his grandfather Booker put it.
Freddie told me that the final bourbon blend was more like a baked potato than a steak. When you grill a steak, he says, you get a different texture on the outside than on the inside. But when you bake a potato, you get a consistent texture from start to finish.
“These barrels went through a very beautiful, even and uniform maturation process to develop that unique flavor,” he told me.
Booker’s Bourbon The Reserves is bottled at 62.95% ABV and will be available in the U.S. in a commemorative wooden box with a suggested retail price of $130 for a 750mL bottle.
That’s not the only innovative bourbon Freddie has released this year. He’s also created the first edition of Little Book The Infinite, a new annual release that begins with a blend of four whiskeys: one by his grandfather Booker, one by his father Fred, one by Freddie himself, and one contributed by all three. Freddie will add a new whiskey for each subsequent year, subtly changing the flavor profile as the years go by.
Related: The Best Bourbons, Old Fashioned, Tasted and Reviewed