Inside the Maker's Mark blending room, where two recipes sharing seven of ten staves became Whiskey Bonded's Kentucky Snickerdoodle and the Men's Journal Spirits Shop's Kentucky Black Forest Cake.
Last time I told you about the sheep, the cypress vats, the red wax, and why a bottle I'd been looking at for thirty years suddenly looked different.
I also told you we didn't drive to Loretto at seven in the morning for a tour.
We went to make whiskey.
Here's how that actually works.
THE CELLAR
After the distillery tour, they took Craig and me down to the limestone cellar.
This is where Maker's Mark finishes Maker's 46 and its Private Selection barrels, and it feels a little like walking into a cave. Cool. Quiet. Limestone on one side, barrels resting in the dim on the other.
The cellar floor is lined with barrels resting on their sides. On the heads are names and dates. Other people's Private Selections, waiting out their additional nine weeks with finishing staves inside.
Our Maker's Mark guide stopped us at a display barrel and showed us how the system works. Ten staves stand vertically inside the barrel, held together around a steel ring. A handle at the top lets you lift the entire assembly in and out, almost like a lantern. Then she let us try it.
If the fermentation room is where Maker's Mark becomes whiskey, this is where Private Selection becomes something of its own.
Just off the cellar is the room we'd come for. Big arched window. Red leather chairs. A long, heavy wooden table.
The far wall looks like somebody poured Maker's Mark's signature red wax across the top and let it drip down in enormous glossy drops.
On the table sat a fan-shaped tasting board with five glasses around the outside and a sixth in the center: Maker's Mark Cask Strength.
Beside it were three long wooden boards, each with ten empty slots. A rack of colored wooden markers. Glass beakers. Crackers.
It didn't look particularly complicated.
Those five glasses were the whole game.
FIVE STAVES. TEN SLOTS.
Here's the part I'd never really understood from the outside. Maker's Mark Private Selection isn't a traditional barrel pick.
We've done those. They're great. You taste several mature barrels and decide which one you like best. This is different.
Private Selection begins with fully matured, cask-strength Maker's Mark. That's the glass in the center of the board. Then you change what happens next.
Ten oak finishing staves go into the barrel with the whisky, and the barrel goes into Maker's Mark's limestone cellar for another nine weeks.
You have five different stave types to work with and ten positions to fill. That's 1,001 possible combinations.
The five choices in front of us were:
Baked American Pure 2 (P2). American oak, slowly toasted. Think brown sugar, vanilla and caramel.
Seared French Cuvée (Cu). French oak cut with ridges to increase the exposed surface and seared with infrared heat. Toasty oak, Vanilla and caramel.
Maker's 46 (46). The seared French oak stave at the heart of Maker's 46, bringing dried fruit, vanilla and spice.
Roasted French Mendiant (Mn). French oak roasted at low heat, with flavors that can move toward chocolate, nuts and dried dark fruit.
Toasted French Spice (Sp). French oak toasted using high and low heat, pushing things toward darker fruit and spice.
Maker's Mark had also prepared cask-strength samples finished individually with each stave. That's the clever part. You don't have to imagine what a particular piece of wood might do to the whiskey. You can taste its influence by itself.
Then you start playing. Taste the five. Talk about them. Start filling the ten slots on your board. Build a recipe. Blend samples in those proportions and taste what you've made.
Then everybody starts talking at once. Too much oak. Needs more fruit. Needs a longer finish. What happens if we lose one of these? Put another 46 in. Try it again. And another glass appears.
It's a hard job. Somebody had to do it.
RECIPE ONE: CONRAD'S SNICKERDOODLE
Two days before we left for Kentucky, Conrad Dodd at Whiskey Bonded sent us his recipe.
Conrad wasn't in Loretto. He was in California. But this first barrel was our collaboration with Conrad and Whiskey Bonded, and there was a reason we wanted his palate driving it.
Conrad has been a real part of my whiskey journey. Long before we ever worked together, I was watching his videos and tasting along with them, and that's how I figured out what I actually liked. Over the years, I've bought a lot of bottles and single barrels on his recommendation, and I kept finding the same thing: when Conrad said something was quality whiskey, I agreed. He knows whiskey at a very high level, but he never makes it feel stuffy. Having him guide this barrel just made sense.
So before we left, we asked him for his formula. Conrad already knew the Private Selection program and the staves well, so he wasn't guessing. He knew exactly what each piece of wood could do.
His formula: four Seared French Cuvée, three Roasted French Mendiant, two Baked American Pure 2, and one Maker's 46.
At the bottom of the note he sent was one instruction that mattered more than the recipe: Always choose what tastes the best, and make sure it has a solid finish.
We printed his email and brought it into the blending room. It sat on the table between the boards.
Then we built Conrad's formula. Ten markers. Into the beaker.
It was very good. Good enough to argue about, which is where this process gets fun.
We tried a couple of variations. Eventually, the two Baked American Pure 2 staves came out. Two more Maker's 46 staves went in.
The final Whiskey Bonded recipe became: 4 Cuvée. 3 Mendiant. 3 Maker's 46.
We tasted it again.
Somebody said snickerdoodle.
Cinnamon sugar. Butter. Warm baking spice. That soft, sweet thing that happens around the edges of the cookie.
Everyone looked at each other. Yeah. That's it.
We'd walked into the room with other names in mind. They didn't matter anymore.
Conrad's recipe had become Kentucky Snickerdoodle.
RECIPE TWO: MEN'S JOURNAL'S BLACK FOREST CAKE
Now we had Conrad's Snickerdoodle. For our Men's Journal barrel, we didn't want to make another version of it. We wanted a companion.
The Snickerdoodle was sweeter, softer, dessert-forward. For ours, we wanted to head somewhere darker. Fruitier. More baking spice. Something that felt like winter. The kind of whiskey you want in a glass when it's dark at 4:30 in December.
We also wanted more length on the finish.
So we kept seven pieces of Conrad's final recipe exactly the same: four Cuvée and three Mendiant. Then we removed the three Maker's 46 staves and replaced them with three Toasted French Spice.
That was it. Three pieces of wood.
You would not believe how different the two whiskies tasted.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, members of the Maker's Mark whiskey-making team walked in, picked up glasses and told us what they thought.
The second recipe had moved. Stone fruit. Cherry. Darker chocolate. Baking spice. And the finish we'd been looking for hung around longer.
Craig said Black Forest cake. Again, the room pretty much knew immediately.
Our Men's Journal recipe had its name: Kentucky Black Forest Cake. Named in the room by the people standing in it.
There's a photo from that afternoon I keep going back to. Two boards are full. Conrad's original recipe is sitting on one. The final Snickerdoodle recipe is on another. And beside them is a third board with ten empty holes next to an empty beaker.
That's Black Forest Cake before it existed.
Half an hour later, that board was full too. I've looked at that picture more than I'd like to admit.
SEVEN OUT OF TEN
This is the part that still gets me.
Kentucky Snickerdoodle and Kentucky Black Forest Cake share seven of their ten staves. Seventy percent of the wood is identical.
And they don't taste remotely like the same whisky.
One became a cookie. The other became a cake.
Three pieces of wood did that.
You're not choosing between Barrel A and Barrel B. You're making a series of decisions about what happens next to an already mature whiskey, and then tasting the consequences.
Maker's Mark calls it Private Selection. Sitting in that room, it felt a lot closer to blending.
PUTTING BLACK FOREST CAKE IN THE BARREL
Once you're finished arguing, the little wooden markers have to become actual wood.
We went back out to the barrel. Inside, you can see the black alligator char from the barrel's original maturation. Then the finishing staves from the recipe are assembled vertically around the ring we'd seen earlier.
You can spot the Cuvée staves immediately because of their distinctive ridged cut.
The barrel in front of us that day was Kentucky Black Forest Cake.
We watched the stave assembly go in. Then the whisky would go back in with it.
The barrel head carried the record: P2: 0. Cu: 4. 46: 0. Mn: 3. Sp: 3.
That's Kentucky Black Forest Cake reduced to five numbers written on a piece of paper attached to a barrel.
Then we got a marker. We wrote WHISKEY BONDED across the top of the barrel head, MEN'S JOURNAL across the bottom, and we signed it.
That barrel represented what this whole project had become: two groups sharing ideas, recipes and, eventually, bottles.
I've done plenty of barrel picks. I'd never signed a barrel whose flavor we'd just helped design.
Small difference. It didn't feel small.
Conrad's Kentucky Snickerdoodle barrel came next.
Both went into the cellar for nine weeks. Then they'd be bottled at cask strength, somewhere in Maker's Mark's 107-to-114-proof range.
And we'd wait.
TWO BOTTLES, TWO PERSONALITIES
I said in the first story that the names sound a little ridiculous until you taste the whiskies. I stand by that.
Kentucky Snickerdoodle is the softer, sweeter side of the pair. Caramel and vanilla. Baking spice. A warm cookie quality that somehow made the name obvious once it was in the glass. It came out of the barrel at 110.5 proof.
Kentucky Black Forest Cake, our Men's Journal companion, goes darker. Chocolate. Dark and stone fruit. Cherry. Warm spice. And the longer finish we'd gone looking for when we changed those three staves. It landed at 109.5 proof.
They're not really meant to compete with each other. They're meant to sit next to each other, they're meant to be shared.
That's actually the part I like most. Two different palates. Two completely different bottles.
THERE WON'T BE MANY
We're splitting the two selections with Whiskey Bonded, which means the Men's Journal Spirits Shop allocation will be roughly 120 bottles of Kentucky Snickerdoodle and roughly 120 bottles of Kentucky Black Forest Cake.
That's it.
Last time I wrote that Maker's Mark left all of us saying the same thing:
This is where you want your whiskey to come from.
After spending an afternoon in that blending room, I'd add one thing.
It turns out it's also a pretty great place to leave a little piece of your own behind.
So whose formula is better? There's only one way to find out.
