small batch is a marketing term that promotes a common American whisky practice. It typically means that the spirit is produced by vatting and bottling a smaller number of barrels than are usual for a production batch of a particular whisky brand. Since small batch is not a federally defined term, that batch may contain two barrels or two hundred or more. Although batch sizes are rarely disclosed, twenty to fifty barrels seems to be the most common range.
Jim Beam’s Booker Noe is considered the pioneer of small batching due to the 1988 release of Booker’s, a bottling marketed as being “small batch.” By 1994, Beam had folded it into a “Small-Batch Collection,” with three other such bottlings. It must be noted, though, that the supposed virtues of “small-batch” production had been a fixture in American food and beverage marketing since the 1930s, when it was applied to everything from soup to candy. By the 1940s, advertisements for YPM blended whisky were boasting that it was made “the small-batch way”; twenty years later, Kentucky River Bourbon said its whisky was small batch because “every step in distilling … is taken more slowly,” and—perhaps more relevantly—the extensive advertising campaign in the early 1980s for Calvert Extra blended whisky touted it as an example of “small batch distilling.”
See Booker Noe II, Frederick; single barrel; and whisky, bourbon.
“Plum Pudding or Whiskey?” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 20, 1940, 33.
“The Small Batch Bourbon.” Salisbury (MD) Daily Times, April 29, 1964, 28.
By: Fred Minnick