Craftsmanship

How Bourbon Is Made, Without the Snobbery

Every bottle of bourbon you open started as corn, water, and yeast. The journey from those three things to the spirit in your glass is where the craft lives and it's not as complicated as the bourbon internet wants you to think.

Here's what actually happens.

Step 1: The Mash Bill

The mash bill is just a recipe. It's the percentage breakdown of grains used to make a particular bourbon. By law, at least 51% has to be corn, but that still leaves a lot of room.

Three main flavor profiles emerge from how distillers fill out the rest:

• High-corn bourbon (75%+ corn) sweeter, softer, easier-drinking. Examples: Maker's Mark, Buffalo Trace.

• High-rye bourbon (20%+ rye) spicier, drier, more aggressive. Examples: Bulleit, Four Roses Single Barrel.

• Wheated bourbon (wheat replacing rye in the recipe) softer, sweeter, rounder. Examples: Maker's Mark, Pappy Van Winkle, Larceny.

When two bourbons taste totally different, it's usually the mash bill talking.

Step 2: Cooking and Fermentation

The grains get ground, mixed with water, and cooked. This breaks the starches down into sugars yeast can eat. After cooking, yeast is added and the yeast strain matters. Different distilleries use different proprietary yeast strains, and that's part of why two bourbons made from the same mash bill can taste different.

The yeast eats the sugar, produces alcohol, and over a few days the cooked mash becomes distiller's beer a thick, sour, low-alcohol soup that tastes nothing like bourbon yet.

Step 3: Distillation

Distillation is concentrating the alcohol. The distiller's beer gets heated, the alcohol vapor rises, gets cooled and condensed back to liquid, and what comes out is much higher proof than what went in.

Most American bourbon is double-distilled:

1. First distillation through a column still produces "low wines" typically around 125 proof

2. Second distillation through a copper pot still (the "doubler") produces "white dog" clear, unaged spirit, typically 130-140 proof

The legal cap is 160 proof. Distill above that and what you've got is closer to vodka too much of the grain character has been stripped out.

The unaged white dog is bourbon's blank canvas. Everything that happens next is the barrel's work.

Step 4: Into the Barrel

The white dog gets diluted with water down to 125 proof or less (another legal requirement) and goes into a new, charred oak barrel. This is where bourbon gets serious.

The "new, charred oak" rule is one of the most distinctive things about bourbon. Other whiskeys can use used barrels  Scotch is often aged in old bourbon barrels, in fact. Bourbon legally cannot. Every barrel is virgin oak, freshly charred over open flame to a specific char level (usually #3 or #4 basically alligator-skin texture inside the barrel).

That char does three things:

• Filters out harsh compounds during aging

• Releases sugars from the wood (caramelized vanilla, toasted oak flavors)

• Acts as a layer of carbon that mellows the spirit over time

Why corn? Why charred new oak? Because the result tastes good and a couple hundred years of refinement have proven the combination works.

Step 5: Time

What goes into the barrel is white dog. What comes out is bourbon. The middle part is what happens during aging.

What All of This Adds Up To

Most bourbon is made from a small set of choices, repeated by every distillery:

• Pick a mash bill (high-corn, high-rye, or wheated)

• Pick a yeast strain

• Distill twice, to a specific proof

• Char the barrel a specific way

• Age it somewhere specific, for a specific time

Every distillery makes those calls a little differently and the small differences compound. That's why two bourbons that look identical on paper can taste like completely different spirits.

The craft isn't magic. It's a hundred small decisions, executed consistently, year after year.

— Charley