Chapter 5: Who Actually Makes Your Favorite Bourbon?

Some of your favorite bourbon isn’t made at its own distillery. It’s reasonable to assume that the brand name on the bottle actually indicates a specific distillery, but the reality is that many bourbon brands are just that–brands that source their whiskey from other distilleries. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and in fact this practice has existed in the bourbon world for practically as long as there have been working distilleries. The problem is that up until the last few years, many brands were not exactly forthcoming about the fact that they didn’t make the whiskey in their bottles. In this chapter we’ll lay out some tips to help you spot the difference between sourced vs. in-house bourbon.

Brands that Source
One of the main producers of sourced bourbon and rye whiskey is MGP, a factory-like operation in Indiana that counts many well-known brands as clients. MGP makes very good whiskey for some very big names, including Dickel, Bulleit, and WhistlePig. Kentucky distilleries contract-distill whiskey for other brands as well, often until they get their distilleries up and running and can produce their own bourbon. Bulleit falls into this category, as does Michter’s, which is likely just a few years away from bottling its own whiskey. Other brands that source or contract distill include High West, Smooth Ambler, Widow Jane, Belle Meade, Kentucky Owl and Redemption.

Tips on Identifying Sourced Bourbon
There’s usually an easy way to tell if your whiskey is sourced or not. If you see something like “bottled in New York” followed by “distilled in Indiana,” that indicates a sourced bourbon. If the brand is new, but the whiskey in the bottle is ten years old–bingo, it’s sourced.

To reiterate, sourcing, or contract distilling, is not a negative, but a bourbon brand that tries to obfuscate this fact can lose the trust of consumers who are ever more interested in knowing where their whiskey comes from.

And as noted before, many of these distilleries are starting to blend their in-house produced and sourced whiskey together, or creating separate bottlings that make it clear which is which. This will be interesting to follow over the coming years as some brands completely phase out sourcing.

Here’s an exercise to try at home–taste a couple of MGP-sourced bourbons side-by-side and see which you like better. Can you tell the difference between them? MGP makes bourbon from a few different mash bills, so maybe one tastes spicier than the other indicating a higher rye content. Or perhaps you can tell that one has been aged for a few more years from its deeper, oakier flavor. 

In the next chapter we’ll talk about wading through bourbon hype and figuring out which bottles are really worth your money.