Holladay Soft Red Wheat Rickhouse Proof Missouri Bourbon

Mike Rosen

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Bourbon | Featured Craft Distilleries

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April 8, 2024

Who are these folks, and how did they get here?
It seems as if the Holladay Distillery just came out of nowhere with releases that are getting a lot of attention lately. The history of Ben Holladay dates to 1856 when Ben and his brother David distilled their first batch of bourbon under the Blue Springs Distillery brand. You can read the history of Ben Holladay and the distillery here. Through the years, the distillery’s name changed five times and only changed ownership three more times. In 1942, the distillery was renamed when it was sold to the McCormick Distilling Company and kept its name when purchased by Midwest Grain Products (MGP) in 1950. In 1993, the McCormick Distilling Company was acquired by Virgin Islands Rum Industries, Ltd., owned by Edward A. Pechar and the late Michael S. Griesser. Under this new ownership, McCormick Distilling continued to produce neutral spirits and, over the next two decades, more than doubled its product line. Their website says, in 2015, “The McCormick Distillery underwent a $10 million dollar renovation of the original stillhouse and began distilling bourbon on-site for the first time in 30 years, resurrecting the Holladay Distillery name in honor of the original founders”.

What is a “Missouri” Bourbon?
Besides meeting the federal standards for bourbon, a 2019 law says that Missouri bourbon must also be mashed, fermented, distilled, aged, and bottled in the state, aged in oak barrels manufactured in Missouri. On January 1, 2020, an addition was added that required a Missouri bourbon to be made with corn exclusively grown in the state.

How it’s made
Holladay Distillery is using an 18” diameter Vendome Copper column still at a distillation proof of 120. Two different-sized grain cookers are used; one is a large high-temperature cooker used for corn, and the other is a smaller lower-temperature cooker used for all the other grains. The soft red wheat mash is cooked at a lower temperature than the rye mash. A sour mash is produced with a 72-hour fermentation time fed by a limestone spring water source that dates to the original 1800s distillery. Independent Stave Company is used for their cooperage with a char level #3 on the staves, and a barrel distillate entry proof of 118, filling about 12 barrels a day, 7 days a week. All their bourbon is non-chill filtered. Holladay uses two non-temperature-controlled rickhouses for their flagship line. Rickhouse B was built in the 1930s and holds 10,000 barrels, and rickhouse C was built in the 1950s and holds 12,000 barrels. Each rickhouse has 7 floors with a 30-degree variance between the first and top levels. The temperatures in Weston climb to 100 degrees in the summer while dropping below zero in the winter.

Soft Red Wheat Bourbon
The age statement on Holladay’s flagship line is six years, which is impressive they waited that long for their first release, never having sourced their whiskey. However, there is a plan in action for older-aged releases down the road. On the 10th of every month, Holladay holds back 10 barrels to be aged for 10 years in rickhouse B. The Ben Holladay rye bourbon mash bill was created from research based on historical distillery records, but a wheated bourbon was never produced at this distillery before. The idea to create the Soft Red Wheat bourbon came from Holladay’s president, Mick Harris, simply because Mick is a big fan of Maker’s Mark and wanted to create a wheated bourbon. The Soft Red Wheat bourbon was first released on March 25, 2003. On the Holladay Distillery website is a Distiller’s Journal, where you can read production notes from Master Distiller Kyle Merklein, and listen to what Kyle has to say in the Holladay Happy Hour podcasts. For the October 2023 batch I’m reviewing, Kyle says, “I had no desire to do another single floor release like what we did in August. Rather, the plan was to again keep a very balanced bourbon that had a nice mix throughout the rickhouse. The one interesting challenge with this batch was that I was trying to allocate all of the remaining barrels for the Soft Red Wheat Spring 2017 distillation season. This was still another large batch for us – a total of 181 barrels were dumped to produce both the BiB and Rickhouse with a barrel loss of 30.0% during aging. The Rickhouse Proof version is 120.1 proof for this bottling. A total of 17 different ricks were used from floors 1-5 with a weighted (floor) average of 3.77. Because of the various ricks used, a total of 32 distilling days were used in the batch from the Spring 2017 distilling season”. With that, let’s get started!