I was able to pick up Maker’s Mark’s latest limited edition wood finishing series for 2024, “The Heart Release.” Gone is the Maker’s 46 bottle style (even from Maker’s 46) and in its place is an elongated regular Maker’s style bottle. Gone also are the wide variety of oak staves, and instead this has ten toasted virgin French Oak staves, although this was the stave mix for the 2023 release. Last year’s BEP release was supposedly the last of the Wood Finishing Series, and this one is the first in a new “chapter.” Someone has obviously been very busy in their marketing department. “Hey we are discontinuing this product, so get it before it is gone. Here’s the new product, but same as the old product, just different packaging.” It is styled “The Heart Release” to honor the employees who work at Maker’s – distilling, barreling, and bottling whiskey. I think “The Heart Release” should be dedicated to the marketing department, who obviously has some Don Draperesque guy running it. This guy came up with an idea of faking the death of the Wood Finishing series, then bringing it back to life again with a different bottle, while using the same oak staves used in the prior year’s release. Much like Don Draper’s Lucky Strikes, these oak staves are toasted. I am sure the folks in Japan at Suntory were thrilled at this pitch – “that which is dead will never die.” But, let us not be distracted by marketing; good bourbon is good bourbon. And at least the Japanese guys are letting the American guys do their bourbon thing at Beam and Four Roses to come up with really good whiskey for us to enjoy. Otsukaresama.

For reference and to explain my marketing rant above, Maker’s was once an independent distillery but is now owned by Jim Beam (aka Suntory in Japan) and this is a wheated bourbon. Which explains why Jim Beam doesn’t put out a wheated bourbon (unlike Buffalo Trace and Heaven Hill) – they have a whole distillery that does nothing but that. This particular release is 112 proof which is slightly higher than last year’s release. One other thing to remember about Maker’s is that they rotate their barrels in the warehouses periodically to maintain a consistent flavor in their bourbon. To spice things up, Maker’s has been experimenting with oak stave finishing for a few years, and this has really caught on with customers. I wrote more extensively about Maker’s Mark here, which includes pictures of me dipping a founder’s bottle in red wax and reviewing one of their very early high proof stave finished whiskies.

The color on this is a nice deep amber with some mahogany, with a nice thing film and lots of legs on the swirl. On the nose is wonderful baked biscuits drizzled in maple syrup, caramel, and a hint of oak. On the palate, the yeasty bready notes and caramel notes are overtaken with black pepper and clove, with a ton of oak. Like the 2023 release, this really has a Pappy Van Winkle-esque quality to it as far as mouthfeel and finish, although the flavor profile is different. On the finish, the clove and oak notes crescendo into a very long, drying, and spicy finish.

I recently had the opportunity to taste Heaven Hill’s Grain to Glass Wheated Bourbon at a Hokus Pokus tasting. I did not like it. Being aged only six years, it just wasn’t ready yet. That is the thing about wheated bourbon – it needs oak, and lots of it, to be really good. Which means aging it for a really long time, or using the addition of oak staves in the barrel to impart those oak notes. As to wheated bourbon, the flavor profile is less grain driven and more oak driven. That is where Maker’s has had real success, in my opinion, in finishing its rather homogeneous standard bourbon with oak staves. It takes an ok bourbon and makes it great. One day I really would like to try their cellar aged bourbon that is between 10 and 12 years old. Because if the addition of oak staves to six to eight year old bourbon for a few weeks can taste like this, I bet more years in the barrel would be particularly spectacular for Maker’s.