Rare and selected Four Roses Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey

Four Roses is an American Bourbon whiskey brand manufactured in the Four Roses distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky and owned by the Kirin Brewery Company since 2002. The Four Roses Bourbon is unusual in that it is blended from a total of ten different straight bourbons produced in the Lawrenceburg distillery. Most other bourbon distilleries use only one recipe for each whiskey and mix whiskeys of different ages and from different barrels to achieve a consistent taste. In addition to Four Roses, the distillery also produces whiskey for blended whiskeys (such as the Seven Crown of Seagrams) and occasionally Bulleit whiskey for Diageo.
The historical origins of the Four Roses brand are not entirely clear. There are several versions of the name Four Roses, of which the distillery uses one in particular with a romantic marriage proposal for its marketing. According to some reports, Rufus Mathewson Roses trademark was founded in 1886 and presumably named in honor of him, his brother Origenes and his two sons.
After Georgia banned alcohol in 1886, Paul Jones jr. from Georgia bought the company in 1888 and incorporated it into his existing business. Paul Jones was active in the alcohol and tobacco trade and already had a small distillery there and moved to Louisville, Kentucky, the former centre of bourbon production. Jones made Paul Jones whiskey and Four Roses. In 1902, Jones merged his company with several other distillers to form Frankfort Distillery, a distillery located in the city Frankfort in Kentucky. When prohibition began in the United States in 1920 and the sale of alcohol was banned, the distillery (trademarks Old Oscar Pepper, Mattingly and More and Antique) was licensed to sell medical whiskey, and at times it produced a quarter of the alcohol sold in the United States.
In 1928, after not only the sale of old stocks but also the production of medical whiskeys was allowed, Jones bought in at the Stitzel-Weller Distillery, as Frankfort Distillery did not have its own distillery building. In the years following prohibition, Four Roses was the best selling bourbon in the United States. At the same time, the Canadian company Seagram began to buy into the US spirits market and, immediately after the end of the prohibition, set up a distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, today s MGP Distillery and bought a dozen smaller US producers in the following years.
After the death of Lawrence Jones in 1943, Seagram bought Fankfort Distillers, who at that time owned a total of five different distilleries, including Four Roses and Old Prentice, in whose buildings Four Roses is now produced. At that time, the American distilleries produced industrial alcohol for military use during the Second World War. After the end of World War II, Seagram centralized its production in the distillery in Indiana and a distillery building they bought in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky - today s Four Roses Distillery. The fact that both distilleries were located in places called Lawrenceburg caused confusion and confusion throughout the time of Seagram s existence.
Especially in the European and Japanese markets, Four Roses Straight Bourbon was an important brand. Four Roses was the most popular bourbon brand in Europe and Japan, after Jim Beam and Jack Daniel s, making the whiskey style known. In the USA, Four Roses was only launched as a very cheap blended whiskey and had a relatively bad reputation. Only in Kentucky and Indiana, in the regions around the Seagrams distilleries, did the Yellow Label Straight Bourbon come into the shops to enable at least the employees of the distilleries there to buy the straight bourbon.
Following the acquisition of the Seagram Group by Vivendi, the distillery was acquired in 2002 by a long-standing Seagram business partner, the Japanese Kirin Brewery Company. After the Straight Bourbon had not been available in the USA for forty years, Kirin reintroduced it there. The distillery is located on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and only a few minutes drive from the Wild Turkey Distillery. Storage and bottling takes place in Cox s Creek, Kentucky, about an hour s drive from Lawrenceburg. The whisky warehouses located right next to the Four Roses site are in fact part of Wild Turkey. Four Roses is the only major bourbon producer whose warehouses have only one level to store all whiskeys as uniformly as possible, which also makes it easier to store and remove the barrels.
After five to ten years, the barrels are combined into different characters during bottling. Four Roses Whiskey usually consists of whiskeys that have been stored for 5 1/2 to 10 years. In addition, up to 17-year-old exclusive single barrel bourbon, various first-class barrel strenght small batch editions as well as strictly limited special anniversary bottlings are also produced, which have been awarded numerous awards for their excellent quality in the past and are today particularly sought after by connoisseurs, collectors and enthusiasts.