O.Z. Tyler Shipping Bourbon The Old Fashioned Way, Down The Mississippi

By Richard Thomas

The very name “Bourbon Whiskey” has its origin in the trade between the farmer-distillers of the frontier Bourbon County, Virginia (later Kentucky) and the merchants and drinkers of New Orleans, and this trade flowed down the Ohio River, into the Mississippi and then to that famous French port city just off the Gulf of Mexico. O.Z. Tyler, the renovated Charles Medley Distillery in Owensboro, Kentucky, has become the middleman in reviving this old trade, as 150 barrels left the distillery to travel to the Big Easy by river.

However, the 150 barrels were not produced at O.Z. Tyler, now owned by Terressentia and using their tech-driven accelerated aging process. Instead, the five year old whiskey was made at an undisclosed distillery in Tennessee and stored in the distillery’s warehousing. It is destined to go to Cane Land Distilling Co. in Baton Rouge, who will finish it in old Cognac barrels and sell it as Original Mississippi Floated Whisky.

So, except for the river travel this news story is more modern than frontier in its practical elements. As part of the gimmick, some question has been raised that the sloshing and exposure to the elements in transporting the barrels downriver by barge will change and possibly enhance the whiskey. This is 2017, though, not 1817. If Jefferson Ocean is any indicator, it’s doubtful the limited transit time on the river will make much of a difference.