Hidden Barn Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey

When Old Forester Master Taster Jackie Zykan announced she was leaving the Kentucky bourbon powerhouse in June, it was an unexpected shakeup to the whiskey scene, removing a fixture who had become quite central to new product selection, blending and marketing at Old Forester. However, it was also a clue toward the inevitable fact that a new company was likely in the making—someone who has received the attention and press of Zykan over the last five years doesn’t just drop off the radar. They use their departure as the launching pad for a brand of their own, and that’s exactly what Zykan (and her legendary palate) have done with the upcoming launch of Hidden Barn Whiskey.

A true understanding of Hidden Barn, as a concept, is just beginning to leak out into the whiskey world, but suffice to say there’s a lot of esoteric, unorthodox technique involved in its creation. Zykan has reemerged with a business plan that seems simple enough on the surface, but gets more and more novel the more you look at it.

First things first: This is a sourced American bourbon brand, and Zykan has not started a distillery of her own. That’s not really a reasonable option for someone in her position, to start from scratch and wait years before a product becomes available—it would squander her own name recognition in the industry during the interminable wait for mature whiskey. Nor is Zykan’s background in distilling to begin with—she has always been known for the attunement of her palate as a taster, which is why she bore the Master Taster label at Old Forester to begin with. Hidden Barn is thus a concept built around Zykan’s prowess as a blender. As she said to The Bourbon Review:

“I don’t wanna be a master distiller. I don’t distill, and I don’t want to be a master distiller that doesn’t distill. I like to play with it post-maturation. I like to take the pieces and tell a story with them. I like to paint a picture with them.”

But Zykan isn’t just buying barrels of mature whiskey from the usual suspects among the major Kentucky distillers. Rather, the sole source of Hidden Barn whiskey (at least for now) is the small Neeley Family Distillery of small-town Sparta, Kentucky, roughly half way between Louisville and Cincinnati. This is a really intriguing and important choice for several reasons. For one, Neeley’s bourbon isn’t particularly well known on the national scene, and thus there’s not really a concrete critical consensus about it in place already. And secondly, the Neeley Family Distillery (under Master Distiller Royce Neeley) is making bourbon in some really novel, uncommon ways, with an eye toward cutting-edge techniques to maximize flavor. Combine the unconventional approach of the source with Zykan’s blending, and you have the components that make up Hidden Barn.

The first Hidden Barn release is a small batch bourbon of only 7 barrels—it’s unclear whether “Hidden Barn Small Batch Bourbon” is meant to be a regularly recurring product or not, but Zykan seems to insinuate that even if it is, there will be plenty of intentional variation from batch to batch. This is a high rye mash bill (70% corn, 20% rye, 10% malted barley) bourbon, and notably it is entirely pot distilled, which is very rare indeed in the modern bourbon scene. Whereas almost all the major bourbon players run a double distillation through a column still and then a pot still “thumper”/doubler, resulting in a fairly clean and concentrated spirit, Neeley is running double pot distillation. This results in a lower distillation proof, and then a lower barrel entry proof—both methods that are less efficient in terms of how much whiskey they ultimately yield per batch, but both methods that are thought to result in a more flavorful, complex spirit.