Who owns four roses

Always call ahead before taking a distillery tour- they are often closed for holidays and special events, as well as production problems and weather. Tours run Monday — Saturday a. Maggie Kimberl is a Louisville-based writer who has contributed to a number of publications in the Central Kentucky area, including Kentucky for Kentucky in Lexington and BourbonVeach. She currently writes for the Alcohol Professor, covering mostly bourbon and whiskey news.

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We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience. By using our site, you agree to our updated Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. And as an element of the acquisition, Four Roses management requested a boon: They wanted to bring their namesake bourbon back to Kentucky. And so, half a century after it was last sold in the U. In fact, as recently as , Four Roses Bourbon was still found only in Kentucky, which seems almost impossible now that you can find bottles in all 50 states.

Once again, however, the company was fortuitous in its timing. Four Roses returned to the U. That lineup was perfect in its simplicity: A bourbon for the masses Yellow Label , a bourbon for the more discerning Small Batch , and a bourbon for the collectors Single Barrel, especially because of its 10 variants. Whereas other distilleries sought to innovate via a steady flow of new product announcements, Four Roses hewed to its core identity, which had been absent from the U.

The view from the top floor of a Four Roses rickhouse. Their process, in fact, is so unique that it allows the company to make four vastly different bourbon products with only two mash bills—one lower in rye content, and one higher.

The main key, as all the fermentology folks out there have surely already guessed, is yeast. Each mash is fermented with one of five separate yeast strains, each of which is labeled with a specific letter of the alphabet. The real alchemy of the job, therefore, is in the blending—the combination of these 10 recipes to create four distinctly different products.

Sitting down to taste the entire Four Roses lineup. Unexpectedly, as I learned while recently visiting the Lawrenceburg distillery facility, the base Four Roses Bourbon is even sometimes used to absorb small, remaining portions of very old stock—recent iterations of Four Roses Bourbon have contained tiny portions of 26 and year-old bourbon, for instance, which likely would have been considered unpalatable on their own.

Although their yellow label bourbon was the top selling bourbon in the U. The bourbon was replaced on shelves by a Four Roses blended whiskey. Through the 60s and 70s, the whiskey market was declining steadily. As a result, companies were setting aside less and less product every year.

But in , something shifted in Japan. Bit by bit, the negative trends started to slow worldwide. By the s, they were leveling out, and by the early s, the whiskey industry was starting to see growth. Within the industry, computerization was beginning to affect quality. Kirin, the company that distributed Four Roses in Japan, bought the distillery and sent an envoy. Their immediate response was yes. Rutledge credits the rise of social media for much of the bourbon boom.