Wilderness Path’s Coming Of Age – The Whiskey Reviewer

By Richard Thomas

The primary time I referred to as on Wilderness Path was early summer time 2016. Positioned in picturesque Danville, a university city on the southern boundary of the Bluegrass that’s an instance of “ye can’t get thar from right here!” (no matter path you come from, it appears it’s essential to go someplace else first to get to Danville), it required particular effort on my half to get there. But the timing was glorious: founders Shane Baker and Pat Heist had simply made the transfer from a micro-distillery in a storage unit in Danville to an previous cattle farm on the outskirts of city, full with nineteenth Century farmhouse. That transfer included the transition from a pot nonetheless to a Vendome 18-inch column nonetheless, which had been in operation for only a yr.

Wilderness Path differed from so many craft distilleries round America in its founders. Shane Baker and Pat Heist weren’t newcomers to distilling, having co-founded Ferm Options in 2006. The pair had met enjoying for a rock band in Pikeville, Kentucky. Baker was an engineer who had moved over to working for enterprise capitalists, consulting on the right way to revive or break up acquired corporations. Heist was a micro-biologist who had been educating at medical colleges. Collectively they bought collectively and commenced consulting on industrial distilling, though that meant working within the American ethanol gas business for essentially the most half. Your automobile had been sipping on the handiwork of Heist and Baker lengthy earlier than something they made had even the slightest likelihood of passing your lips. The pair didn’t begin Wilderness Path and distill their first barrel of whiskey till 2013.

So I met the pair three years into their new booze-making enterprise, and it was nonetheless very a lot early days for the corporate. That they had, in truth, solely just lately modified the corporate title from Wilderness Hint, after a sure firm with a distillery in Frankfort objected to using the phrase “Hint.” The property had the 2 unique farm buildings, a barn and the purple brick farmhouse, plus the distillery constructing, bottling plant and a small 2,200-barrel rickhouse. The latter was so small as to be distinctive in Kentucky; Rob Samuels is claimed to have labeled it “cute.”

I used to be conscious of how Wilderness Path had grown within the eight years since in a statistical sense. I knew about how they most popular to attend 4 or 5 years for their very own manufacturing to be prepared for launch as bottled in bond whiskeys, and the way these preliminary releases had since come out. In 2017, they purchased the property throughout the street; later that very same yr, the corporate introduced an virtually $10 million growth plan.

Understanding all that may be very completely different from seeing it, nevertheless. Roughly a dozen medium-sized rickhouses have been erected; a customer middle constructed; and a 36-inch column nonetheless added, successfully tripling output over what they’d in 2016. That meant Wilderness Path was filling roughly 70,000 barrels per yr earlier than their first expression had been launched. The crown on all that development got here on Halloween Day 2022, when Campari introduced they had been shopping for a 70% stake in Wilderness Path.

It’s a really meteoric rise. As described, Wilderness Path rose from working a really artful scale to having a really medium-sized distillery in only a few years, after which to what I’d say pushes the boundaries separating medium-sized from giant distilling only a few years later. Kentucky has seen some newcomers within the center and enormous scale sectors lately, however Bardstown Bourbon Firm, Rabbit Gap and New Riff all began out as mid-sized producers. Bardstown Bourbon Firm had quadruple growth baked into its DNA/constructing plans from the start. What Wilderness Path did was very completely different certainly, and it begs the query of how Baker and Heist achieved all of it.

First, it needs to be mentioned that Wilderness Path accomplished its first growth at an excellent time within the center 2010s. Very similar to New Riff Distilling in Northern Kentucky, they’d ample manufacturing capability at a time when quite a few sourced manufacturers had been both coming into being or else searching for somebody to contract produce their whiskey at a time when all of the Kentucky Majors (the state’s large distillers) had been all exiting the enterprise of contract distilling and/or quietly buying and selling in aged inventory whiskey.

That contract manufacturing turned the engine for the corporate’s fast development. Wilderness Path has over 1 / 4 million barrels of whiskey saved of their rickhouses, however the overwhelming majority of these barrels belong to their contract clients. Equally vital in that image had been Shane and Pat themselves: hiring Wilderness Path as your contract producer additionally meant using the experience of two males who had been quick turning into referred to as “the Science Guys of Bourbon.”

The opposite facet is the excitement that surrounded Wilderness Path and what they had been doing. By committing to bonded whiskeys, and thereby deciding to sit down on it for 4 or 5 years earlier than releasing it, Baker and Heist earned their model as a lot credit score for authenticity a newcomer may probably get, and authenticity is effective foreign money with bourbon nerds.

But additionally they veered off in their very own distinct path from the remainder of the Kentucky bourbon business. In a state recognized for bitter mash whiskey-making, Wilderness Path is a candy mash store. Bitter mash refers back to the follow codified by Dr. James Crow within the early nineteenth Century of utilizing backset (leftovers from the earlier batch) in beginning a brand new mash for whiskey. In an period when germ idea was both unknown (and later not but extensively accepted), bitter mash was a preventative step in opposition to contamination and helped obtain consistency. Right this moment, bitter mash is extra conventional, however not mandatory extra environment friendly. Additionally, because the phrases bitter and candy mash suggest, bitter mashes are extra acidic, which has its affect on the flavors popping out of that mash.

One other characteristic that set them other than everybody else in Kentucky is their low corn model of bourbon-making. Each the wheat and rye bourbons use 64% corn, with 24% wheat or rye respectively.  That’s about 10% decrease than the norm for corn, with the flavoring grain being somewhat larger than regular and the distinction made up by extra barley. Additionally they favor Cooper’s Choose barrels from Unbiased Stave Firm, which make the most of staves which have been air seasoned for 1 1/2 to 2 years.

This isn’t to say every thing at Wilderness Path is working in opposition to the grain of Kentucky norms. Their rye matches very a lot within the Kentucky rye model; they use #4 alligator char on these very seasoned barrels; and their entry proof of 134 is typical. Nonetheless, the distillery does its personal factor in simply sufficient methods to set itself other than the neighbors, and that’s one thing that tends to excite nerds as effectively. Furthermore, it fits their considerably remoted location in Danville, which is kind of off the overwhelmed observe of the Kentucky Bourbon Path.

The final component is Baker and Heist themselves. They introduced a potent mixture of enterprise, chemical and engineering experience to their start-up; it’s arduous to think about anybody besides John Teeling who knew extra about the right way to begin a whiskey-making firm than these two earlier than embarking on that very mission. However past that’s Pat Heist, who’s a pure evangelist for his course of and product. In an period when Grasp Distillers have taken on a few of the glamour of a rock star and are counted upon to be ambassadors, Heist’s enthusiasm is infectious and anybody who hears him talk about how he makes Wilderness Path ought to need to have some.

 

 

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