Do You Use The Term “High Rye?” Then “Small Batch” Is OK Too.

By Richard Thomas

The term “small batch” originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, probably invented by an unknown marketing employee at Jim Beam and brought into the public space by their Master Distiller and legendary promoter Booker Noe. The idea behind it was the bourbon in the bottle came from small selections of barrels, perhaps no more than a few dozen, which required more handicraft in barrel selection than what was the norm for the big whiskey companies (the typical mass market product is made with a dump batch of several hundred or over a thousand barrels). Small batch and the labor behind it implied greater care, and therefore quality.

This term was later enshrined by the Jim Beam Small Batch collection, a group of four new brands launched in 1992 which consisted of Knob Creek, Booker’s, Baker’s and Basil Hayden. The term was later applied more generally to the launch of a series of premium bourbons during the Nineties, including Woodford Reserve in 1996 and Buffalo Trace in 1999. Some point to Maker’s Mark as being the original small batch, even though the Samuels family never used the term and still do not, because the bourbon has always been made in batches of approximately a dozen.

The Problem With Small Batch
Woodford Reserve and Buffalo Trace were part of the idea and the revival of bourbon through the introduction of premium brands, but Brown-Forman and Sazerac never claimed them as small batch bourbons, and that contradiction underlines what would later become a problem for the term. Although the concept underlying it is clear enough, it lacks the clear, hard definitions applied to other whiskey terminology, like cask strength, age statements, straight and Bottled in Bond.

Back in the 1990s and 2000s, bourbon drinkers were grateful just to have these brands, and frankly I do not recall anyone complaining about vague terminology. Yet the reason why was two-fold: the companies using the term were all well-established, legacy organizations and there were not that many of them; and the internet forum did not exist for malcontents to invent and air their grievances on.

But as the revival of American Whiskey gained momentum in the 2000s and turned into the Bourbon Boom during the next decade, the number of brands calling themselves small batch proliferated, more malcontents were drinking and the internet became a thing. As those three trends converged, complaints about small batch being term either abused into meaninglessness or that never had any meaning in the first place came to dominate the bourbon fandom culture. Although griping about small batch is not quite the proof of bona fides that it used to be, the term remains tarnished with many fans today.

Croakers Gonna Croak. Always.
Although the folks who have come to enjoying bourbon nerd-ery since the 2010s may have innocently absorbed some scorn for the term small batch from their forebears, the original croakers were just as hypocritical and consciously, maliciously selective in their attitude towards the small batch as they have been towards most everything. One way to illustrate this is all of the same folks freely use the term “high rye” to describe a certain type of bourbon, which is fine except that “high rye” is just as vaguely defined and open to abuse as small batch ever was.

High rye bourbon refers to a class of whiskey made with the traditional bourbon mash bill of corn, rye and malted barley, only with an especially large proportion of the secondary, flavoring grain of rye. Yet what the traditional proportion should be is not especially well-defined, nor is what an extra-large helping should be. Bourbon that has 30% or more rye is obviously high rye, but what about 28%? Or 25%? I have seen mash bills as low as 22% credulously described as high rye, and I challenge any expert to sit down at a blind tasting and tell me which bourbon is 18% rye and which is 22%.

One of the most disingenuous facets of all the croaking about the term small batch was the implication that some company somewhere was flagrantly abusing the term, putting large batched dumps into the bottles and labeling it small batch. Yet no one could ever name someone doing that. It was a rumination as vague as the term itself allegedly was. Yet here we are with the term high rye, just as loosely defined, and there are some pretty popular examples of bourbon with rye proportions in the low to middle twenties being called high rye. Not so much as a ribbit from the croakers attends that.

Consistency is doing the same thing repeatedly and reliably, integrity is consistency applied to morality, and hypocrisy repels anyone with integrity or consistency. So, it isn’t surprising that the people who made so much noise chewing over the small batch cud never ruminated at all about exactly the same problems, only in the flesh as opposed to the imagination, about the term high rye. After all, the same folks cried daily about wicked non-distillery producers with their misleading labeling while happily singing the praises of products of Kentucky Bourbon Distillers (later Willett), whose products like Rowan Creek and Noah’s Mill were perfect examples of said practices. And you won’t see any of them turn their backs on a bottle of Col. E.H. Taylor Small Batch offered at MSRP.