This is the barrel under most of what we bottle. New American white oak, coopered and charred to a #4 “alligator char” — roughly 55 seconds over open flame, deep enough to crack the surface into the reptilian pattern the char level is named for — then used exactly once for someone else’s straight bourbon before it reaches us. That single prior fill matters: a brand-new barrel pulls tannin so fast it can overwhelm a delicate spirit, and the bourbon that sat in it first has already softened the most aggressive wood sugars into a state that extracts more evenly.
We buy these direct from cooperages in Kentucky and Missouri rather than through a barrel broker, specifically so we can hold char level constant fill to fill — a barrel spec sheet that just says “heavy char” can mean anywhere from 35 to 60 seconds depending on who’s timing it, and that variance shows up directly in how fast a barrel colors.
