The story behind Makers Mark Whisky - Blog post by Ulrik Bertelsen
Post by Ulrik Bertelsen
In 1840, the Samuel family established the first commercial distillery. Their bourbon whiskey quickly gained popularity and remained so until the Prohibition era in the USA in 1921. After the end of Prohibition, Bill Samuels Jr. resumed production and decided to modernize the 170-year-old family recipe into a smoother bourbon whiskey with sweet notes of corn, barley, and winter wheat, characteristic of a quality bourbon. To achieve this, Bill Samuels Jr. set strict requirements for production, including the use of pure spring water with low iron content from a lake near the distillery.
The standards remain high today, with the bourbon being aged in new American oak barrels for between 5½ and 6½ years, depending on temperature and humidity. Then, 19 barrels are selected at a time for each batch, the smallest number in American whiskey production. During aging, the barrels are manually rotated to ensure a consistent maturation process.
After maturation, each bottle is manually sealed with a unique layer of wax. Maker's Mark has taken many years to perfect, hence the recipe has remained unchanged for over 40 years.
Five years, seven years, or eight years - they're just numbers to them. At Maker's Mark, they've never aged their whiskey for any specified period of time. Instead, their tasting panel, including their master distiller, samples each batch at least five times during the maturation process. It's ready when they say it's ready. And so far, they haven't been wrong.
It's best enjoyed neat, with ice, or in cocktails such as Old Fashioned and Whiskey Sour.
Water
The unique bourbon taste of Maker's Mark can actually be attributed to pure, iron-free limestone spring water. It comes from our only water source - the beautiful 10-acre limestone spring-fed lake at the Maker's Mark Distillery.
Mash Bill
With a base of red winter wheat instead of traditional rye, they ensure that Maker's Mark will be full-bodied on the palate but lacking the sharp roughness of rye-based whiskeys. This, along with naturally malted barley and yellow corn, results in a distinctive full, yet gentle flavor that hasn't changed in over half a century.
Copper Stills
Visitors often comment on how attractive our distinctive copper stills are, but they are also workers. An important part of their double distillation process removes impurities to create a more refined whiskey to sip on. This entire double distillation process may not be very efficient, but it certainly makes for a better whiskey.
Cypress Tanks
Our cypress fermentation tanks are literally irreplaceable - with some of the planks over 200 years old. Cypress was chosen for fermentation before modern stainless steel tanks were available. These old cypress tanks still work fine, and they give our visitors a historically accurate sense of our fermentation process. And of course, we've never liked whiskey with a stainless aftertaste.
Oak Barrels
We only use charred white oak barrels to hold our whiskey while it ages. We may lose a little whiskey due to evaporation and absorption during this process, but rest assured, it's worth it. Due to the oak's charring, the natural sugars from the wood are released into the bourbon, enhancing the already wonderfully smooth taste of Maker's Mark.
Barrel Rotation
One of the many things they still do manually here at the distillery is their barrel rotation method. It's expensive, inefficient, and a practice most distilleries have long abandoned. But because each barrel is exposed to uniform temperatures in their warehouse, Maker's Mark's premium taste never varies from one bottle to the next. That's just how they do things.
The People
It takes a pretty bold distiller to sell off his family's assets, invent a new whiskey recipe, and start over. In 1953, after describing his family's whiskey as "common," Maker's Mark founder Bill Samuels Sr. did just that. In 1958, Samuels introduced his new whiskey to an unsuspecting American public, and an entirely new bourbon category was born - Small Batch Bourbon, handcrafted in smaller quantities to preserve the quality and authenticity of the distiller's product. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, American distillers were eager to get back into the spirit game. While their hands had been tied by the arms of the law, they had seen Canadian whiskey, tequila, rum, and Scotch whiskey flow across America's borders thanks to effective smuggling operations and acts of bootleggers and rum-runners. This haste created a bit of a problem - in their rush to re-enter the market, most distillers released young and harsh-tasting bourbons. The Samuels family's whiskey, T.W Samuels, was such a product. In 1953, Bill decided to sell out and look for a new way to distill his family's whiskey.
He bought and rebuilt a distillery in the idealistically named Happy Hollow, located just outside of Loretto, Kentucky. Bill's next move proved to be revolutionary: in a ceremonial display, he burned the centuries-old family recipe in front of his family and set about creating a new recipe for the family's bourbon using, at first, a humble kitchen stove. The grain rye is often noted as the "flavor grain" in bourbon. According to U.S. law, bourbon must be distilled from at least 51% corn, and traditionally, the rest of the mash bill was a combination of barley and rye. After baking a wide variety of breads from different grains to determine the flavor profile he was seeking in his new whiskey, Bill decided to use soft red winter wheat instead of rye. He believed that the softer and milder characteristics of wheat would make a great bourbon - smooth, mild, and gentle on the palate. In 1958, when the first batch was released to the market, he was proven right.
Bill Samuels Jr.
With seven generations of bourbon history in his blood, one might think that the head of Maker's Mark® had his sights set on taking over the family business from a very young age. But that wasn't the case with Bill. He wanted to be a basketball player, a rocket scientist, and a lawyer. He inevitably became all three, playing basketball in high school, studying rocket science at Case Western Reserve University, and earning a law degree from Vanderbilt University. After returning home to take a temporary job at the distillery, his true calling found him. He took the reins in 1980 and oversaw Maker's Mark's rise from a struggling family distillery to a brand recognized worldwide for its unique taste and exclusive appeal - all while maintaining the family tradition of handcrafting every drop of Maker's. Not bad for a "temporary" job.
