Four Roses' annual Limited Edition Small Batch — released each autumn, usually around the distillery's September Kentucky Bourbon Festival — is one of the most anticipated releases in American whiskey. Master Distiller Brent Elliott selects a handful of the distillery's ten recipes, chooses mature barrels (often well into double digits in age), and blends them at cask strength without chill filtration.
Each year's blend is different. Elliott treats the release as a showcase of the recipe system's range, sometimes emphasising high-rye recipes with K yeast for spice, other years leaning on the fruit-forward V or delicate O strains. The common thread is age: these are always Four Roses' older barrels, stocks that have spent a long time in the distinctive single-storey rickhouses at Cox's Creek that Four Roses is famous for — warehouses designed to limit the extreme top-to-bottom variation typical of tall Kentucky ricks.
The Limited Edition Small Batch carries on a tradition started under Jim Rutledge in 2007, when the programme began, and Elliott — who took the reins in 2015 — has pushed it into increasingly refined territory. Recent releases have regularly scored in the mid-nineties with critics and sell out within hours of hitting shelves.
Drink it neat, slowly. The reward for patience is one of Kentucky's most articulate bourbons: a conversation between old wood, careful blending, and a recipe system no other distillery can match.
