Wheat vs. Rye - Mutually Exclusive?

[funknik]

I'm curious about this -- in most wheaters I don't detect any rye hints, but sometimes I think I do...am I imagining things or can a bourbon have both? Well, I guess it COULD have both -- there doesn't seem to be anything in the rules against that -- but do any?

[marco246]

A few days ago I finished off a long-held bottle of Woodford Reserve four-grain bourbon. That is, it had both wheat and rye as well as the other grains. This was a special bottling and is not the normal WR, which has rye as the secondary grain. It was pleasant but undistinguished. There was a bit of rye spiciness, some chocolate, and the finish had a faint metallic tang. I'd be happy to accept one as a gift (which this was) but would not seek it. It seemed to me that in this case "more was less".

Cheers,

Mark

[jburlowski]

You can add Corner Creek and the new Woodstone Creek to the list of bourbons with both rye & wheat.

[shoshani]

You can add Corner Creek and the new Woodstone Creek to the list of bourbons with both rye & wheat.

Corner Creek claims to be corn, rye, and wheat - no barley.

I honestly find that difficult to believe, because all signs point to Heaven Hill as its source (the Bardstown on the bottle is a huge giveaway), and to my knowledge HH doesn't make such a mashbill. What the guys behind Corner Creek probably did is order a mingling of either "rye" bourbon and "wheat" bourbon, or perhaps "wheat" bourbon with straight rye whiskey.

Either that, or whoever made their label got confused and it's really a one-or-the-other deal in the bottle.

[OscarV]

It has to have barley to get the fermenting going.

I heard that Corner Creek is a four grain bourbon but it got it's four grains by blending a ryed bourbon and a wheated bourbon.

I had a bottle but never finished it, it was pretty bad.

Muddy is the best word for it.

[cowdery]

I've talked to the owner of Corner Creek and he honestly doesn't know, but he says he wanted wheat because he had a past history with Old Fitzgerald. So it might be a wheater, or not, or it might be a mixture of wheated and rye-recipe bourbons, but it's not from a four grain mashbill.

As for tasting rye characteristics in a wheater, or vice versa, it's possible to taste a characteristic you normally would associate with a certain grain in a whiskey that doesn't actually contain that grain because those associations aren't so precise. Some characteristics normally associated with rye can also come from the barrel. Some characteristics of wheaters can come from simply very low levels of rye, allowing the sweetness of the corn to become dominant, especially when it has taken on a lot of barrel sweetness too.

A good whiskey is always more than the sum of its parts.

[OscarV]

As for tasting rye characteristics in a wheater, or vice versa, it's possible to taste a characteristic you normally would associate with a certain grain in a whiskey that doesn't actually contain that grain because those associations aren't so precise. Some characteristics normally associated with rye can also come from the barrel. Some characteristics of wheaters can come from simply very low levels of rye, allowing the sweetness of the corn to become dominant, especially when it has taken on a lot of barrel sweetness too.

One recent example of this was last year's Parker's Heritage Collection.

A couple of people who contibute to this board say that they think it was a wheater.

It is not.

But there have been a couple of times when I have had it, cut from 122.6 down to 98 prf that I to picked up wheater similarities.