Friday, August 29, 2014

New Whiskey Labels: Highland Park 1968, New Booker's Labels and a Texas Bourbon from Indiana


This week's most interesting new labels from the federal TTB database:

Edrington cleared a label for a 1968 Highland Park.

Companies that release different batches or barrels of a whiskey usually use numerical codes to designate them, but lately, using descriptive names seems to be getting popular.  Apparently Beam has caught on to this trend as they cleared a series of Booker's 2015 labels with titles like "The Center Cut", "Kentucky Chew" and "Booker and Bear."  See here, here and here for the complete set.

Check out this label for Texas Bourbon Whiskey from the The Original Texas Legend Distillery.  Could anything be more Texan?  Wait, what's the back label say?  You guessed it.  Distilled in Indiana.  Interestingly, a previous label from this company neglected that last bit.  As with today's news that Templeton Rye will clarify its label to show where the whiskey is actually made, maybe all of our shouting about the state of distillation rule is finally having an impact on the TTB (and whiskey enthusiast Wade Woodard deserves particular credit for putting the screws on bottlers in Texas who aren't using Texas distillate).

Note:  The fact that a label appears on the TTB database does not necessarily mean it will be produced.  In addition, some details on the label, such as proof, can change in the final product.


2 comments:

Destro said...

...and of course, he's a "master distiller."

Gary A. Turner said...

Wow - up to 17 labels to choose from, collect them all! I wonder if their plan is to use a couple of them for the same batch (to get folks to try to collect all of the label variations of the same exact batch; ala comic books that have alternate covers to the same book)? Or if they will let customers vote on which ones they will use (like Monopoly did with which game piece to create)? I do like having a name and a batch # both to go by, as some of us recall one better than the other. Plus, one more thing for us geeks to be geeky about :)