One of the most central, inherently important questions that any whiskey industry company must answer before launching is the following: What is this company’s relationship with tradition?
The people behind West Virginia Great Barrel Company asked themselves all of those questions, and what they settled on was that although tradition may inspire the cooper’s art, it can’t dictate how they assemble a barrel. Instead, this is a young company driven by achieving theby any means necessary, even when it runs counter to what may have long been considered “conventional wisdom.
WV Great Barrel Co. doesn’t place much emphasis on the air drying, because they’re extremely focused on reinventing the process of toasting, which they believe brings the same changes to a newly constructed barrel, albeit much more efficiently. Nor do they see toasting as an artisanal process, romanticizing the use of open flame—rather, they want to rigorously control the exact level of toast as closely and consistently as possible.
These barrels, custom built for the collaboration, are composed of alternating staves of standard American white oak and cherry oak, with two different toast profiles. Thus, in the finished barrels, each stave alternates between lightly and medium toasted American oak and cherry wood. The alternating staves were chosen to impart a more gentle cherry oak profile, rather than constructing an entire barrel out of this wood.