Manhattan time! #cocktails #4roses #smallbatch

[photo credit: olle]

(Here’s the secret Four Rose Warehouse decoder map.)

This is the interior of one of the warehouses. There are 90 racks (45 left and 45 right). Each rack holds up to 22 barrels. Each rack has six tiers. This organization is repeated twice in each warehouse. So, a single warehouse can hold over 23,000 barrels. However a warehouse is considered full when it reaches 90% capacity, or about 20,000 barrels.

So Four Roses is expanding production massively like many other distilleries in Kentucky. This is part of a new bottling facility that hasn’t come on line yet. These are storage tanks for whiskey that’s been dumped and blended (think: yellow label). Each of those tanks holds 5000 gallons. The room we’re standing in is designed to hold twice that many tanks.

That’s the end of the trough that dumped barrels are rolled onto after they come off that truck you saw in the first video. The bungs just get dumped there I guess. All the black stuff is char from the inside of the barrels which broke off once the barrels got rolled and knocked around.

Another video just focusing on the filling station with will handle up to four barrels at a time.

Here’s a really cool panning video of barrels coming off a truck to be dumped and new barrels being filled. While Four Roses is a LOT bigger than KBD, this is still a very small operation compared with the big kids.