Maker’s Mark, the Kentucky distillery revered for its use of wheat in its bourbon mash bill, recently unveiled the 2026 release of Star Hill Farm Wheat Whisky. The whisky is, on the surface, an exploration of wheat as the flavoring grain. But once you delve deeper into the expression and chat with Master Distiller and Head of Innovation, Blending, Dr. Blake Layfield, the philosophy behind Star Hill Farm is brought into sharper focus.
Across the tasting in London and throughout my conversation with Blake, three things came through clearly: a distillery guided by philosophy, a genuine commitment to regenerative agriculture, and a restless appetite for flavor innovation.
Star Hill Farm Wheat Whisky & The First New Mash Bills Since 1953
The story of Star Hill Farm begins with a question. As Blake tells it, the distillery’s managing director, Rob Samuels, grandson of Bill and Margie, asked how Maker’s might showcase the flavor of wheat. That question led the team to create their first new mash bills since 1953, working out from the Classic recipe of 70% corn, 16% soft red winter wheat, and 14% malted barley.
They began by practicing subtraction, taking out all of the corn to create a 70% wheat and 30% malted barley mash bill. From there, the logic was to push further. “How do you know you’ve gone too far unless you go far enough,” he said, and so they then practised isolation, arriving at a second mash bill of 100% malted wheat.
I asked Blake about the decision to use entirely malted wheat in the second mash bill. The malting process, he explained, tricks the grain into germination before drying brings it to a halt. “Much like cooking, the time and the temperature can create different flavors within the grains, that’s true for wheat and for barley.” It is also a great catalyst for enzymatic activity, breaking down long chain starches in the wheat and fermentable sugars.
The combination of the two mash bills, in Blake’s words, drives the complexity you find in the whisky itself.
The 2026 Release of Star Hill Farm Whisky
The 2026 Star Hill Farm (like the 2025 release) is a blend of the two mash bills detailed above, the 70% wheat and 30% malted barley alongside the 100% malted wheat, coming together in a combined makeup of 27% wheat, 62% malted wheat, and 11% malted barley. It has been aged for a minimum of seven years.
What sets this release apart from the 2025 is the introduction of hard wheat varietals, hard white, and an heirloom hard red, into the mash bill. The decision to use them came from a desire to understand the distillery’s own longstanding preference for soft red winter wheat. So, Blake and his team decided to experiment around it and see what they could come up with.
Much as Bill Samuels did in 1953, the team started with bread. Working with Dr. David Van Sanford, a professor of agronomy at the University of Kentucky, they baked their way through the available varietals before committing anything to the still. “That varietal made the best bread, let’s distil it and see if that flavor translates,” Blake explained, treating the loaf as a fast way into the ballpark before the slower work of distilling and aging began.
During the tasting in London, Blake explained that the hard white wheat added complexity, vibrancy, and mouthfeel, whilst the hard red wheat added spice, brightness, and notes of pear.
Star Hill Farm Wheat Whisky 2026 Tasting Notes
Here are my personal tasting notes for the 2026 release, which was resting in a tasting glass when I arrived, and was tasted about 15 minutes later.
Nose: Quite intense right out of the gate. Dark molasses, poached pears, dark toffee, sourdough, dried hay, and black cherries.
Palate: It has a great weight on the palate, lots of presence. First, I get cinnamon, black cherry pie, and buttery shortbread. Then comes a hint of fig, plums sprinkled with brown sugar, and more cinnamon. It has an earthy quality, but it is darker and heavier than the 2025 release.
Finish: Long, with plenty of baking spice and good staying power. Cinnamon and pear notes linger.
Craft at Scale
The level of attention to a single grain that can be seen (and tasted) in Star Hill Farm 2026 is only possible because Maker’s grows and controls so much of what goes into the bottle, and it points to something larger about how the distillery sees itself.
For all that Maker’s Mark has grown, Blake is adamant that it has never stopped behaving like a craft distillery. “Maker’s Mark was and is the predominant and founding craft distillery,” he said, and the argument he builds from there is about responsibility rather than size.
The grain is regeneratively certified, the distillery is a B Corp, and Blake sees no reason those commitments should apply only to small producers. “If a distillery the size of Maker’s Mark can certify our grains as regenerative, if a distillery the size of Maker’s Mark can be a B Corp, why can’t others? We’re setting the standard for what responsible growth should look like.”
Regenerative agriculture, in his telling, is not primarily a sustainability story. It is also a flavor story. He returned more than once to the idea that healthier, more biodiverse soil makes for more nutrient-dense and flavorful crops, and that better crops make better whisky.
The comparison he reached for was, again, the kitchen. “It’s just like a chef who relentlessly pursues getting great ingredients,” he said. “How do we get the best, most flavorful ingredients, just like a good chef would? That is what regenerative ag really brings to us. It’s all about flavor.”
That insistence on place runs deep, and it shapes how Blake talks about terroir. He is unconvinced by the view that grain is simply a commodity to be sourced cheaply and branded over.
The recipe alone, he argues, does not make the whisky. “I could give you the recipe for Maker’s Mark and the distillation parameters, but you couldn’t make that in Tennessee, you couldn’t make that in Texas. It would not taste the same, it wouldn’t be Maker’s Mark.”
The flavor of the place, in other words, is something he believes you can taste.
Star Hill Farm As An Innovation Lab
If regenerative agriculture is about getting the best out of the grain, the way Star Hill Farm is matured is about getting the most out of the barrel. Here, Blake makes a deliberate break from the way Maker’s Mark Classic is produced.
The Classic is rotated through the warehouse for consistency, but the Star Hill Farm barrels are left where they are. “We do not rotate the barrels with Star Hill,” he said. “We actually leave them in their rick positions, and we do that because we want nature to make that as a blender.”
The barrels tend to sit in the middle of the warehouse, where temperature exposure is more even than at the extremes, but the variation between warehouses and levels still hands him a spread of flavors to work with. For a blender, that diversity is the raw material of complexity and depth.
This is where the idea of Star Hill Farm as an “innovation lab” comes into focus, because the ambition runs well beyond an annual release. Each year will be different, a snapshot of the farm and the place at a particular moment, but the deeper purpose is what the distillery learns along the way.
Blake talked about exploring what wheat varietals bring, how soil health shapes the flavor of grain, and how terroir and farming practices feed into the whisky. The endpoint he described is genuinely long-term. “How can Star Hill Farm be an innovation lab for us to create our own proprietary strains of wheat or barley for us to use that could potentially go into Maker’s Mark Classic?”
The relationship runs in both directions. Star Hill Farm gives the team a space to experiment, and what they discover there could one day improve the whisky that made the distillery famous. As Blake put it, the aim is to “continue to make a better Maker’s Mark tomorrow than we did today”, with Star Hill Farm as the place where the work happens.
Maker’s Mark & Star Hill Farm: Two Sides of the Same Project
The two expressions, then, are not rivals but two sides of the same project. Star Hill Farm is the land Maker’s Mark is made on, and Blake sees each as a way into the other. Star Hill Farm, he says, will always be a small release, but its job is partly to widen the conversation around what the distillery does.
He pointed to the familiar idea that people are drinking less, and made the case that they are also drinking better, whether that means the liquid, the packaging or the values a brand stands by.
That framing matters to how Star Hill Farm is best understood. For Blake, the sustainability message works best when it follows the whisky rather than leading it. The approach he described is to let the whisky do the convincing first.
“This is a really great whisky,” he said, “and this is how we’ve done it.” Get someone to care about what is in front of them, and the conversation about regenerative agriculture and what it does for flavor follows naturally.
On that measure, the 2026 release does its job. For me, it edged ahead of the 2025, darker and more brooding, where last year’s was lighter on its feet, though both are very good, and the preference is a personal one.
That, as it turns out, is exactly what Blake is after. He told me he knows he has done it right when the two are distinct enough that people taste the difference and then discuss which they prefer. “They’re both great whiskies, different,” he said. “There’s very much personal preference, and that’s the conversation that we love to have.”
Read the full article at Dr. Blake Layfield on the Whisky That Could Reshape Maker’s Mark
