A couple days ago, I attended a fun event, the Season 8 kickoff and Tri-State regional competition for Speed Rack. Speed Rack is a timed and judged bartending contest, intended to raise the profile of female bartenders and raise money for breast cancer research. Sponsors, typically spirits brands, pick up all the costs, which lets them pass on all proceeds to charity. Each sponsor gets a table in the ballroom, and you can sample their spirits, try their cocktails, and pick up branded swag.
Four Roses is Speed Rack's bourbon sponsor, and it was a highlight to swing by their table. They had a large-format cocktail served in a punchbowl, their "Lawrenceburg Cooler" — you can see the recipe by clicking the picture — which was good but a little unbalanced as served here. (The recipe seems good but perhaps their proportions were a little off when they were scaling it up.) I also got to try their Single Barrel expression; more on that later, but first a note about Four Roses' unique system of labeling, and their various recipes.
Unusually among the big bourbon distillers, Four Roses has been pretty transparent about their process. Some of the distillers won't talk about their "mashbills" — the recipe that outlines the proportions of grains that make up their whiskeys. Four Roses does. And all of the distillers are very careful about their yeast, often maintaining proprietary strains and constantly testing them in the lab to make sure the flavor of the distillate doesn't change. What makes Four Roses' approach unusual — besides their candor — is that they use two different mashbills and five separate proprietary yeast strains, for a grand total of ten different whiskeys that they distill. (They also use single-story rickhouses to age the barrels of whiskey; most of the other big distilleries in Kentucky have enormous multistory warehouse buildings.)
The company uses four-letter codes to denote the ten separate recipes. The first letter is always "O", which is a code for the Four Roses Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. (The distillery plant itself was built in 1910, shut down for Prohibition, and re-opened in 1933 as the Old Prentice Distillery. The "O" dates from the days of Seagrams' ownership of the distillery, and is how they used to refer to the Old Prentice Distillery.)
The second letter indicates which mashbill they used. Four Roses has two mashbills, "E" and "B." The "E" mashbill consists of 75% corn, 20% rye, and 5% malted barley, and the "B" mashbill is 60% corn, 35% rye, and 5% malted barley. (Most bourbons have around 8-10% rye, and generally anything over 20% is referred to as a "high-rye" bourbon. Therefore, all of Four Roses' bourbons are high rye by definition, lending them a definite spicy zing.)
The third letter is always "S", which stands for the kind of whiskey this is: straight whiskey. This is a legal definition; in Title 27, Chapter I, Subchapter A, Section 5.22(b)(1)(iii) of the Code of Federal Regulations, the feds define "straight whiskey" as whiskey created by distilling a fermented cereal grain mash to a spirit that's not more than 80% alcohol by volume, and then aging the spirit for at least two years in new charred oak barrels at an entry proof not exceeding 62.5% abv. Coloring, flavoring, or diluting with anything other than water isn't allowed under these regulations either. Most American premium whiskeys are straight whiskeys; blended whiskeys are explicitly something different (though they usually contain straight whiskeys), and when you see the word "straight" missing from a label, that's your signal that it's likely either a blend or that it hasn't been aged the requisite two years in new barrels. (Or has been flavored.)
The fourth letter indicates which of the five proprietary yeast strains — V, K, O, Q, or F — was used to ferment the mash. According to the company, Yeast V gives a "Delicate Fruit" note, K is "Light Spice", O is "Rich Fruit", Q is "Floral Essence", and F is "Herbal Notes."
All ten of these recipes are blended and bottled at 80 proof to create the flagship Four Roses Bourbon (often known as Four Roses Yellow Label). But wait!, you say. Didn't you say that blended whiskeys aren't straight whiskeys? True. A whiskey that's sold as a "blended whiskey" is usually 20% straight whiskey and 80% neutral grain spirit. Boring. They're basically whiskey-flavored vodka. The ten-whiskey blend (sometimes whiskey people will use "melded" or "married" to avoid the B-word) can still be called a straight whiskey because it's entirely made up of straight whiskeys distilled in the same state. As this exhaustive infographic from Four Roses a few years ago indicates, the flagship largely rests on recipe OBSK, with the other B-mashbill yeast variants, and recipe OESK, with the other E-mashbill yeast variants. I think this is a very good house high-rye bourbon to have on hand, and it's usually a shockingly good value for money.
Their Small Batch expression is also really good, and consists of four of the recipes mixed together: they select for "light spice" and "rich fruit" of each of the two mashbills, using recipes OBSK, OBSO, OESK, and OESO, and bottle at 90 proof. Note that "small batch" doesn't have any kind of legal definition, so each distillery's approach to a "small batch" release may vary. However, the Four Roses master distiller Brent Elliott has said that he uses an average batch size of around 250 barrels, averaging around 6 1/2 years old, and they're blended very carefully to keep a consistent flavor profile.
Single Barrel is where it can get interesting. As whiskey is both an industrial and an organic product, you can have some real variation between barrels; the wood, the location in the rickhouse, the age, the weather all can contribute to how a whiskey ages. When you're mixing lots of barrels together for consistency's sake, you can iron out any rough spots, but if you're bottling everything from one barrel, there's nowhere to hide. Elliott does a great job picking the best barrels of recipe OBSV for the Single Barrel release at 100 proof.
I was happy to taste the Single Barrel for the first time in some years. My overwhelming first impression was shock that this was 100 proof, as it didn't taste hot or burny in any way — just lots of robust, round flavor. I have limited success with picking out things that liquor brands' tasting notes point out, and the nose was slight, but I did get the pear note they suggested, along with something a bit more floral, such as lychee or elderflower. The taste was silky smooth and complex. I got big notes of woodiness, cherries and figs, and warm caramel, à la Werther's Original. I also vaguely caught the teeniest bit of mint or menthol...but I'd need to have another taste or twelve to be sure. The finish was long and rich, and some spiciness and pepper emerged near the end, from that 35% backbone of rye. (I actually was surprised I didn't get a bit more pepper from the rye. I think I need another taste.) This is really a wonderful bourbon, and spectacular value for money — you can pick up a bottle in NYC for around $40 right now.
And then to make things really interesting, Four Roses also releases Limited Editions of various recipes and small batch blends. The company also works with liquor stores and bars to let them select their own barrel. They're also very up front about what goes into these; for instance, their current 130th Anniversary 2018 Limited Edition Small Batch has a 10-year-old OBSV, a 13-year-old OBSF, a 14-year-old OESV, and a 16-year-old OESK. No proportions given, but this tells you an awful lot about what's in the bottle. (I did not see this one available for tasting the other night, which makes sense given how limited it is. But it sounds delicious.)
Actually, as PUNCH notes in this fascinating article, Four Roses is so transparent that Elliott is known to answer emails asking for the proportions and the recipes! They don't mind consumers trying to recreate their blends; after all, they're selling more whiskey that way.
The company also releases Single Barrel bottlings — at barrel strength! — of each of its ten whiskey recipes. The bottle at left was a very nice Christmas gift for me a couple years ago, and it is delicious. I really like that Four Roses tells you everything from the age to the recipe to the bottling date...and they even tell you which warehouse the barrel came from, what side of the warehouse it was in, the rack number (out of 180 racks per warehouse), the tier the barrel rested on, and a letter code for depth into the row. No one else shares as much information; Four Roses knows their geeks! (For instance: this bottle shot from BreakingBourbon.com's review shows that their particular bottle's barrel was in Warehouse P, on the North side, on rack #39, on the first tier, and the third barrel deep on the row.)