If you’re the type of whiskey geek who pays close attention to things like mash bills of your favorite distilleries, then you’ve probably noticed the slow creep of malted rye into the distilling world in recent years. If you’re a beer geek, on the other hand, you may have just assumed it was there all along, as beer is primarily brewed with malted grains. In the rye whiskey world, however, traditional American ryes were always produced from unmalted rye grain, and this convention effectively created the spicy, drier profile we now associate near universally with rye whiskey. But malting was always an option as well, and distilleries are increasingly turning to it in order to transform the profile long associated with rye whiskey. Such is the case for the newly announced Basil Hayden Malted Rye Whiskey from Jim Beam.
Credit on this release goes to the company’s younger leader, eighth generation master Freddie Noe, who heads up the innovation side of the Beam distilling operation. Where some distilleries now use both traditional rye and malted rye in conjunction with each other, Noe opted to craft this one exclusively from malted rye–a 100% malted rye mash bill, in fact. That’s a pretty big philosophical departure from the traditional, 51% Kentucky rye style, but it gives this bottle a chance to reflect the flavor profile of the malted rye with no other outside influences. The company describes the malting as having created “a more subtle, mellow spice with delicate sweet and floral notes,” dubbing it “the more refined side of rye.” It makes sense that the Basil Hayden brand was chosen for the experiment, given that the brand traditionally spotlights Beam’s higher-rye bourbon mash bill. The company recommends neat drinking–which only makes sense, given the low 40% ABV (80 proof)–for the brand, which carries a $60 MSRP.
A brief disclosure: I have had mixed feelings on most whiskeys I’ve sampled to date that heavily rely on malted rye. Having first developed a taste for rye whiskey in the mid-2010s via exposure to very high-rye brands with 95-100% rye mash bills from the likes of MGP of Indiana and Alberta Distillers Ltd., perhaps it’s only natural that my personal taste has always embraced the bolder, spicier, potentially more abrasive side of the grain. Rye whiskeys featuring lots of malted rye, on the other hand, have a tendency to read to me as sweeter but especially as much more grain forward, with more of a toasty, bready or “doughy” dimension that I haven’t always preferred. As time has gone by, I’ve increasingly gone out of my way to seek out rye whiskeys that don’t contain malted rye. This is all to say that Basil Hayden Malted Rye probably finds itself at a bit of a disadvantage in terms of its appeal to my personal preferences.
So with that said, let’s get to tasting this new bottle.