Castle & Key Small Batch Straight Bourbon

There’s a special sort of fanfare in the whiskey community that is reserved for when a new distiller of Kentucky straight bourbon officially comes of age. This milestone is of course achieved when they release their first brand of straight bourbon, which can technically be done after the whiskey has spent two years resting in newly charred oak barrels. More commonly, though, distilleries opt to wait until the whiskey reaches four years old, at which point it can legally be labeled as simply “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey” without any additional need for an exact age statement. That is the moment when it’s generally reckoned that a distillery has officially graduated to becoming a full member of the Kentucky bourbon community, and for Castle & Key that time has finally come.

Castle & Key is a distillery that has had oceans and reams of copy written about it since co-founders Will Arvin and Wes Murry purchased the defunct, derelict site of the Old Taylor Distillery, which had been out of commission since 1972. After buying the site in 2014 and beginning its restoration into a modern distillery, Castle & Key has subsequently produced an array of new products, including some really excellent, punchy gin, and the brand’s first whiskey, Restoration Rye. But a veritable army of Kentucky bourbon obsessives have been patiently waiting on this release, Castle & Key’s first branded Kentucky straight bourbon. There was so much anticipation, in fact, that bottles sold out in minutes.

Lost in the shuffle, meanwhile, is the rather odd route that the brand has taken to get to this point. After beginning its distilling operations in the mid-2010s the distillery garnered tons of headlines for its hiring of former Brown-Forman distiller Marianne Eaves as its Master Distiller, making her the first female Master Distiller working for a Kentucky distillery since before Prohibition. Eaves quickly became the focus of almost all of the company’s PR over the next few years, but she then seemingly unexpectedly left Castle & Key in mid-2019, before any of the whiskey she’d distilled for the company had ever been released. Subsequently, Eaves has referred to the experience positively as a “fairy tale job,” but never quite explained why she decided to transition instead into a career of industry consulting and freelance blending/distilling. She’s since given birth to her first child and launched a variety of initiatives, including a blind tasting box service called Eaves Blind.

Castle & Key, meanwhile, seemed to react to Eaves’ departure by scrubbing whatever traces of the former Master Distiller still remained from the company’s branding. You won’t find any reference to her in any of the company press releases announcing this bourbon, for instance, despite the fact that she presumably oversaw its initial distillation and aging. Nor has Castle & Key ever seemingly hired or promoted another individual to the job title of “Master Distiller,” having seemingly done away with the job title entirely since Eaves left in 2019. Curious if the company wanted to clarify this situation, I reached out with some questions, which received no reply. It remains a confusing footnote in the Castle & Key story.

Edit: After publication, I heard back from a Castle & Key representative who said the following: “After joining the Castle & Key team, Marianne helped to develop Castle & Key’s recipes, processes, and oversaw distillation until 2019; she departed Castle & Key before our whiskey was at a point of maturity. Castle & Key’s new bourbon reflects the blending skills of Jon Brown, Castle & Key’s Quality Manager, who runs the Research & Development Department, and Brett Connors, who handles blending at the distillery on a day-to-day basis.”