It’s been five years now since Luxco announced the official creation of Lux Row Distillers as the parent company for such whiskey brands as Rebel Yell, Ezra Brooks, David Nicholson Reserve and Blood Oath, and a few things have changed in that time. Perhaps most notably, Luxco was purchased by MGP of Indiana for almost half a billion dollars at the start of 2021, and MGP has subsequently started using Luxco/Lux Row Distillers as a more recognizable parent company for its own, excellent George Remus bourbons.
At its core, however, Lux Row remains essentially the same sort of business it has been: One that primarily sells sourced Kentucky bourbon. Although they’ve been distilling and aging their own whiskey for a while now, good things take time, and the company has managed to carve out a niche for itself in the meantime using exclusively sourced juice. They don’t officially disclose their source, but given that the mash bills match up perfectly with Heaven Hill, it seems very safe to say that the vast majority of Lux Row brands are coming from the Bardstown icons.
One of the newer and lesser known of those brands is Daviess County Bourbon, which was first released in the beginning of 2020 and had its rollout swept aside on some level by the pandemic. Luxco is now putting another push behind getting Daviess County and its two variants (Cabernet barrel finished, and French oak finished) some exposure, however, and it’s not super hard to sell us on taking a look at this one, given its interesting makeup.
Daviess County Bourbon seems meant to be something of a hybrid brand—a meeting point between traditional bourbon (rye recipe) and a wheated bourbon mash bill. Both are presumably being sourced from Heaven Hill, meaning that the standard bourbon mash bill (78% corn, 10% rye, 12% malted barley) is the same stuff that makes up Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, etc., while the wheated mash bill (68% corn, 20% wheat, 12% malted barley) is what you’d find in Larceny or Old Fitzgerald. Here, they’ve been combined in a non-age-statement bourbon that we still would expect probably has at least decent age on it, given the $40 price point. In terms of strength, it weighs in at 48% ABV (96 proof). The company promises that the two mash bills together offer “balanced sweetness and spice.”