by EllenJ » Wed May 29, 2013 9:47 am
That's the "beauty" of single barrel bottlings.
If you particularly enjoy the subtle (and sometimes not so) differences in the same product aged in different barrels, single barrel is the way to go. With single barrel, the barrels are hand-picked to represent approximately the flavor profile of the brand. The whiskey to be bottled is dumped one barrel at a time, reduced to bottling proof, and bottled. There are about 250 bottles (750ml) in a barrel (approximately; evaporation affects each barrel differently) and all of those will taste the same. If you select a bottle from a different barrel, chances are it will taste differently. Sometimes VERY differently. I can recall that Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit represents both one of the finest bourbons I've ever tasted, and also one of the nastiest. Other brands seem to have less variation, but that's the fun of enjoying single barrel bourbons.
If you're looking for consistency and repeatability of flavor, you're better off with normally vatted whiskey. In that case, several barrels (in the case of small batch) or even hundreds of barrels are dumped together into a large holding tank, or cistern. Here, the distiller or bottler has much more control over the end product. He can use whiskey from barrels located in different parts of the warehouse, barrels that - by themselves - fall outside the desired flavor profile, but combined with their opposites make for a more complex finished mixture, and (except in the case of Bottled-in-Bond) he can include older whiskey to enrich the flavor, even whiskey purchased from another distillery.
Personally, except for the curiosity value of single barrel bottlings, I find that small-batch vattings are much more expressive of the distiller's art and more enjoyable to drink. And I like being able to depend on what's going to be in that bottle when I open it.