DISTILLERY
170°F, but Dwayne is keeping his mouth shut on this one). The rye is then added and allowed to rest for 15 minutes. The mash is once again cooled, this time down to sacchari cation temperatures and the malted barley is added for starch conversion. Dwayne says they do use some commercial enzyme preparations to help ensure that the correct amount gelatinisation and conversion occurs. Like many of its peers, Bulleit is a practitioner of the hallowed art of sour mashing. Dwayne wouldn’t tell me the percentage of backset that they add back into the new sweet mash – often a closely guarded secret by many a bourbon distiller – however, he did indicate that they typically add backset to the cooker, though they are set up to add it to the fermenter as well should the need arise. The mash is nally cooled to 68-80°F and transferred to one of twelve, 20,000-gallon fermenters. The nal volume per cook is just over 9,000 gallons and two cooks ll one
starting a cook and the second stag- gered to start a second cook about 45 minutes later. Here in bourbon country we don’t get too fancy with our cookers. Bulleit’s two cookers come straight from the standard bourbon cooker mould: direct steam injection for heating and large internal coils for cooling. Mash water is drawn from the nearby Guist Lake (pronounced Guy-st). Once it reaches the distillery it is run through a simple macro ltration to remove large particulates, on to a micro ltration, and nally a carbon lter to remove any unwanted odours. While somewhat tight-lipped on a few of the ner points of Bulleit’s cook- ing process, Dwayne is kind enough to tell me some of the basics. They start with their corn. It is added to the cooker along with their ltered water and heated to 210°F (98.9°C) for 20 minutes to ensure proper starch gelatinization. The mash is then cooled to a lower temperature (I suspect it’s around
Grain bins, 3,300 bushels each. (Photo Matt Strickland)
Bulleit’s new 52-foot tall column still, built by local copper-wizards Vendome.
52 ● BREWER AND DISTILLER INTERNATIONAL I october 2019
i bd.org.uk
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