Wild Turkey Forgiven

Mistake or Not?

My favorite part about this spirit is the story behind it.  The blood, sweat, tears and mistakes… wait what was that…mistakes.  There are no mistakes  in making whiskey, are there?  Well for some people they may call a mistake “trying something new” or “new concepts”, which may be true but others just call it an oops.

Why not take a chance right, or how costly is it going to be?  In some cases those chances or oops have paid off with amazing rewards and amazing sprits.

A great example is from our friends at Wild Turkey.  An employee mistakenly dumps a batch of rye into a bourbon batch.  Now that is one heck of a mistake.  Some organizations would consider this a very costly mistake and maybe even call for grounds of termination and I am sure at the thought probably crossed Wild Turkey’s mind too.  But they decided to wait it out.  The mistake had been made and there was no turning back, so they took a chance.  They allowed the barrel to sit and waited to see what kind of flavor profile it would create.  Today that profile is considered a profit.  So much that after they sold out of the first batch so fast that they recreated the mistake for batch number two!  Now they couldn’t label this whiskey as Mistake 1 or Oops we goofed, so they chose the appropriate  name (in my opinion) Forgiven.

So lessons learned.  Pay attention to what you are doing when marrying barrels.  Don’t fire the employee right away for the mistake it could make you money and maybe some new concepts are worth trying out.  Cheers!