Widow Jane Distillery tells BourbonBlog.com.com they are introducing Baby Jane Bourbon by Widow Jane, the brand’s newest, small-batch, hand-assembled blend of bourbons distilled both at Widow Jane’s home in historic Red Hook, Brooklyn, and in Kentucky.
This Bourbon is made using Widow Jane’s own, unique “Baby Jane” corn. While other distillers in the U.S. have crafted bourbons using heirloom corn, Widow Jane Distillery notes that their Baby Jane Bourbon may be the first to utilize a “proprietary” heirloom corn variety.
About Baby Jane Bourbon By Widow Jane:
Age: 4-6 years
Proof: 45.5% ABV (91 proof)
MSRP: $50/750 ml
Allocation: 15,000 total cases
Availability: Nationwide beginning in June 2024.
How The Bourbon Was Born
In 2013, Widow Jane Head Distiller Sienna Jevremov and the distillery’s long-tenured operations lead, Michele Clark, began a labor of love that would last a decade.
They had ordered heirloom corn seeds from seed banks across the country and turned to farmer John Gill, whose land was just a few miles north of the famed Widow Jane Mines from which Widow Jane sources limestone-rich water to proof its whiskeys, to plant several strains of heirloom corn. Of those, Bloody Butcher Red and Wapsie Valley Yellow proved the most successful.
Side by side, Bloody Butcher and Wapsie Valley grew. A byproduct of this growth was a cross-pollination that produced a natural, if inconsistent hybrid of the two.
For four years after that first meeting, Jevremov and Clark returned upstate where they painstakingly harvested the hybrid corn, plucking individual kernels with just the right medium-tone coloration, and replanting those kernels. Eventually, their efforts yielded an entirely new, proprietary strain of heirloom corn they christened “Baby Jane.”
The tightly-curated, raw heirloom materials are cooked low and slow, then fermented and distilled in Jevremov’s 1000-liter pot and column hybrid single pass still in the Brooklyn distillery, with the process mimicked in Kentucky as well, before being gently placed into new, charred American oak barrels. The result is a bourbon rich with notes reflective of the grain and the barrel, with the classic Widow Jane profile of stone fruits and the remarkably long finish Widow Jane whiskeys always deliver.
Clark tells us, “There are certainly easier ways to make whiskey that don’t involve actually developing and perfecting an entirely original strain of corn. Tasting the results of all that painstakingly detailed work – trial after trial after trial until we got the liquid where we wanted it before laying it down in barrels – is incredibly gratifying and we hope everyone enjoys this bourbon as much as we enjoyed the journey we took in making it.”
As is the case with all Widow Jane whiskeys, Baby Jane Bourbon is non-chill filtered and proofed with the pure limestone mineral water from the legendary Rosendale Mines of New York, just 100 miles north of the distillery, which contributes to the round mouthfeel and exceptionally long finish.
Widos Janes says that Baby Jane Bourbon will set a new standard for your everyday sipping bourbon.
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