INGENUITY
FROM GRAIN
TO GLASS

High-quality grains are fundamental to flavor, so we treat them as levers we pull to help us create unique profiles across our products. We work with four types of grain to create our distinct mashbills: corn, wheat, malted barley, and rye, tinkering until we get the exact—and we mean exact—right proportions for all our expressions.

Unlike most American whiskeys, Wilderness Trail implements a sweet mash fermentation process using all fresh ingredients for each batch, rather than adding acidic backset (a.k.a. spent grain) from a previous batch. Where most other distillers employ a sour mash system, we were among the first Kentucky distillers to embrace sweet mash as our sole mashing technique. 

Our proprietary infusion mashing process is another scientific game-changer that maximizes flavor while using as little energy as possible. Our distillers ensure grain integrity by maintaining a precise temperature when cooking. Others have adopted this process, but we’re the first to do it at scale.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right. We adhere to the rigid pre-Prohibition production standards of “bottled-in-bond” classification, a rigorous set of rules established by the US government in 1897. They’re among the strictest, most highly regulated quality standards in the world of whiskey today. 

To uphold these uncompromising criteria, Wilderness Trail’s small-batch bottled-in-bond whiskeys are all house-distilled on-site in a single distilling season, aged for at least four years in our bonded warehouses, and bottled at exactly 100 proof.

“Small batch” is a term that gets tossed around a lot, but true to form for a science-minded operation, we’re painstakingly thorough. So when we say “small batch,” we mean it. We carefully craft our bonded whiskeys in small batches of 20 barrels or less, to ensure that each batch of Wilderness Trail is produced with precise attention to detail.