If you’re a bourbon enthusiast, you’re probably familiar with the fact that Four Roses uses ten different recipes when making their whiskey. There are two variables that they play with to create different flavor sets. The first is the mashbill which features either a higher (35%) or lower (20%) percentage of rye. They also choose from one of five different yeast strains. Depending on the yeast used during fermentation, the resulting whiskey could feature fruitiness, spice, floral notes, or herbal qualities. The recipe code follows the format O [E/B] S [V/K/O/Q/F]
The annual Limited Edition Small Batch release is one of the rare cases where I’m happy that it’s not a single barrel expression. With ten recipes to choose from, Master Distiller Brent Elliott has a lot of different flavors to play with and most of the recipes blend together really nicely with each other. This year’s small batch release is comprised of 12 year old OBSV, 12 year old OESV, 16 year old OESK, and 19 year old OBSK. I rarely enjoy well-aged bourbon on its own as I often find it way too oaky and tannic for my taste. As part of a blend with younger whiskey, however, small amounts of really old bourbon gives the final result a layer of depth and enough oak to make for a nicely balanced final result.
Here’s what Four Roses had to say about this year’s release:
Non-chill filtered and bottled at a 111.4 proof, the 2020 Limited Edition Small Batch features four different hand-selected batches aged 12 to 19 years. These batches represent four of the distillery’s 10 distinct Bourbon recipes – a 12-year-old Bourbon from the OBSV recipe, a 12-year-old OESV, a 16-year-old OESK, and a 19-year-old OBSK. “Each batch in this year’s limited edition bottling is an exceptional whiskey that could have stood on its own as a single barrel offering,” Elliott said. “But in this case the sum is even greater than the parts – as together these bring a perfect balance of bright, vibrant flavors and aromas from the 12 and 16-year-old barrels combined with the oak tones and aged expressions from the 19-year-old batch.”
There are 14,040 bottles available which is unfortunately just a single bottle short of being a palindromic bottle count (someone has to hold distilleries accountable for these egregious oversights). This is a barrel proof release, but this whiskey clocks in at a reasonably accessible 55.7% ABV.
