Though perhaps overlooked as an ingredient, wood is one of the most important elements of whiskey. During its time in barrels, whiskey doesn’t just mature and mellow; it takes on flavors that become synonymous with the spirit, such as the vanilla and caramel derived from American white oak.
Inevitably, some distillers are exploring other ways to shape their whiskeys with those wood-driven flavors—ways that might offer more options, more efficiency, or greater flexibility.
While purists may balk at the lack of a barrel, a few noteworthy American producers are making a serious case for drawing that wood character from in-bottle infusions.
Courtesy Split Spirits, Middlebury, Vermont
Against the Grain
For Will Drucker, founder of Split Spirits in Vermont, one of the things that intrigued him about whiskey was the impact of the barrel.
Drucker hails from Illinois, whose state tree is the white oak. He grew interested in the flavors that white oak imparts to bourbon as well as how locality might play a role in that expression.
“I started to wonder about the variations based on where the white oak was grown,” Drucker says. “Just like how pinot noir grapes from France differ from those grown in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, there are different flavors based on climate, soil, and local conditions.”
He says he began experimenting by charring pieces from his family’s woodpile and placing them into moonshine. The color changes that happened in the spirit over the first few days, followed by flavor changes over the following weeks, got Drucker’s wheels turning. If a singular piece of wood could have that much impact on a spirit, what kind of impact might other types of wood have?
Bourbon, by definition, must age in new American white oak barrels. However, the possibilities for other whiskeys are more open—and a major constraint has long been that oak happens to be less porous than other woods. While other woods might impart some interesting flavors, very few types are fit for making barrels. However, without the need to store whiskey in a barrel, you could submerge various types of wood directly in the spirit to contribute flavor.
“I started buying unaged whiskeys and filling glass jars with them and whatever woods I could find,” Drucker says. “I spoke with chefs about what kinds of wood chips they used for barbecue. I asked wood workers what smelled the best when they were working with it. I researched what types of wood Native Americans used for cooking.”
Positive feedback from friends and liquor stores persuaded Drucker to seriously consider wood-infused whiskey as a viable product. He looked for a distillery partner and found that he liked Appalachian Gap in Middlebury, Vermont, both for the quality of their spirits and their solar-powered, climate-neutral facility.
Drucker’s Split Spirits hit shelves in time for the 2019 holiday season. He soon became more involved in distillery operations, and within a few years, the Appalachian Gap founders asked if he’d like to take on majority ownership. Today, under the Split Spirits name, the distillery’s full portfolio includes its Appalachian Gap line and the Split Spirits line of three wood-infused whiskeys.
Drucker designed those three infused whiskeys—named Illinois, New York, and Vermont—to capture three regions that are personally important to him while also having strong agricultural and culinary reputations. The woods are Illinois white oak, New York black cherry, and Vermont sugar maple. The whiskey recipes also differ, with mash bills that feature mostly corn with rye and barley for Illinois; 100 percent organic, regeneratively grown rye from Ithaca for New York; and a combination of regeneratively grown malted barley, organic corn, and rye for Vermont.
Each of the three woods also contributes distinctive flavors. Notably, black cherry and sugar maple couldn’t be a part of the picture without the infusion: both are too porous for barrels.
To source the wood, Drucker has developed relationships in each of those three states. He gets the white oak from his own family farm in western Illinois. All it takes is a big box of wood that he ships back to himself once a year, he says. He works with a gourmet firewood operation in Saratoga Springs, New York, for black cherry and with a fourth-generation forester near Dorset, Vermont, for sugar maple.
That ease of sourcing and shipping speaks to the sustainability angle of in-bottle wood infusions.
“I can use 5 percent of the total amount of wood, compared to a white-oak barrel, to impart flavor to a comparable volume of liquid,” he says. “I just need portions of trees already harvested for lumber, and I don’t need the commercially viable parts. So, I can take pieces that might be too short or have too many knots—all I’m after is the flavor.”
Courtesy Bare Wood Spirits
Bare in the Woods
Michael Reed, founder of Bare Wood Spirits in O’Fallon, Missouri, got his inspiration for infusions from a more illicit source.
Reed says his grandfather ran nightclubs and bars and would often fashion his own cheaper booze and use it to refill brand-name bottles; he’d first add pieces of wood because they “made it taste better.”
Reed says he kept that in mind as he grew up and began homebrewing and distilling. When the pandemic hit, he gave in to his curiosity and began to explore building a brand around wood infusions. He approached Jonas Buxton, an engineer, entrepreneur, and whiskey enthusiast with whom Reed had worked before on nonbeverage projects.
“Mike brought me whiskey, vodka, and tequila he’d been aging in bottles with wooden rods,” Buxton recalls. “My mind was blown—they were all silky, had no burn, you didn’t have to mix them with anything.”
Reed and Buxton patented their bottle design—the rod (or dowel) of wood is partly exposed to the air, while its shape allows plenty of surface contact with the spirit—and launched Bare Wood Bourbon in November 2023. They’ve since added vodka, tequila, and rum to the line.
Eventually, Reed and Buxton say they plan to have their own distillery, but for now they’re focusing on the wood infusions that make Bare Wood unique. Meanwhile, they source their spirits, including the bourbon, from MGP Ingredients, which is based in Atchison, Kansas, and has a large distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Bare Wood also occasionally collaborates with smaller producers, such as Blacksmith Distillery in Lohman, Missouri.
Reed and Buxton say they’re excited about the variety of wood suddenly open to them without the restrictions of barrels. Buxton says Reed had “infinite” experiments in the works for wood-and-spirit combinations, and for their initial lineup they simply picked what tasted best. There are four traditional bourbons infused with white oak, hickory, cherry, and maple. The vodka infusions are white oak and cherry, while the tequila and spiced rum both get the white oak.
Currently, they source their wood from a standard dowel supplier, but they plan to switch to The Barrel Mill cooperage in Avon, Minnesota, for what they refer to as their “full launch.” That will be when they open their tasting room, tentatively planned for the end of the year.
“They can toast and char to our specs to save us time,” Buxton says, “and [they] have access to the wood species we know we like as well as ones we’d like to experiment with in the future. The wood they use is aged and humidity-controlled with the intent of being turned into barrels, and you can tell the difference.”
Courtesy Split Spirits
Roasting, Toasting, and Interacting
At Split Spirits, Drucker’s typical whiskey batch size is small: His 15- to 20-gallon stainless-steel milk tanks yield 25 to 40 cases of 200-milliliter bottles.
That batch size requires as much as 1,000 split pieces of wood, which Drucker equates to maybe three armfuls of firewood. The pieces of wood are slim and about five inches long. “They offer such high surface area, you don’t need much,” he says.
Drucker splits the wood with an ax and roasts it with pellets of the same species. To replicate the toasting and charring process of barrels—and to ensure the whiskey benefits from the same dynamic of different sugars caramelizing at different temperatures—he chars half of the roasted wood with a propane torch. He separates the roasted-only and the roasted-and-charred pieces and puts them in cheesecloth bags, which then go into the whiskey in the tank before bottling. At packaging, only the non-charred pieces go into the bottles because the charred ones tend to create sediment and can yield an unpleasant bitterness if infused for too long.
Bare Wood, meanwhile, invites some consumer interaction with their patented bottle, designed to closely simulate the effects of barrel-aging.
“Our spirits are ready to drink when you get them, but there’s a tab on top of the cap you can pop and expose the bunghole,” Reed says. “Micro-aeration takes place through barometric pressure, heat changes take place; there’s a natural breathing.” He says that process successfully achieves the tannin breakdown and evolution of more complex flavors, much like a whiskey’s time in the barrel.
“Our rods have a 30 percent higher surface area–to-liquid ratio than that of a 55-gallon barrel,” Buxton says. “This allows the consumer to realize the flavor differences significantly faster.”
Spreading the Message In-Bottle
Strict whiskey purists may never be the target audience for in-bottle infusions, but there are plenty of other consumers eager to engage.
“I don’t think people realize how much there is to know about whiskey and wood,” Drucker says. Many of his conversations in the Split Spirits tasting room or at events are with people who are curious about wood’s flavor impact.
That may also include the lowdown on how, technically, wood-infused whiskey that’s not barrel-aged must be referred to as a whiskey-adjacent spirit; the three Split Spirits bottles are labeled as “spirit distilled from grain.”
However, Drucker says many consumers get excited about the sense of place in each bottle, as well as the unique wood flavors that they’re not used to getting from whiskey.
“I had someone in the tasting room who was astonished at the New York spirit,” Drucker says. “She said she had never loved whiskey before but liked this one, and that it reminded her of tea her Korean grandparents made from dried plums.”
Bare Wood plays up the interactive aspect of its lineup. Not only can consumers control how long they “age” their Bare Wood spirits, but they can also change things up, placing different wood spiles in different liquors. Buxton says they encourage people to experiment and take notes, and that some customers meet for bottle shares to compare the results of their own projects. When their tasting room opens, they plan to start a membership program to expand on that social component.
Buxton says they’ve also had to be intentional with their branding and marketing.
“When I got us into our first liquor stores, I insisted on our own displays,” he says. “We have beautiful labels, but the key aspect of our product requires education. We designed displays with signage, visuals, and takeaway info.”
That information, he says, leads people to the Bare Wood website, where they’ll find transparency on the process and the sourcing, plus text that covers everything from how it works to what customers can do with it at home. And Reed says he believes having a tasting room will be crucial to that consumer education.
“People have 200 years of experience knowing barrel-aging and sealed bottles,” he says. “This is all new, so they’re understandably like, ‘What is that?’ But people are excited because we’re giving them control. We’re turning them into little bootleggers.”