Frank August’s Bourbon-Rye Blend Is Excellent

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

There are a lot of new whiskey brands out there these days that source from other distilleries. This is a tried and true practice, but it presents a challenge—how do you make a name for yourself in a pretty crowded field? Do you just turn to a distillery like MGP to supply your whiskey, come up with a pretty bottle and a catchy name, and hope people will buy it? Or do you try to do something different to make yourself stand out? It seems like Frank August has chosen the latter path.

Johnathan Crocker launched Frank August in 2022, and released its first bourbon that same year. The whiskey is sourced from undisclosed Kentucky distilleries, which Crocker admits kind of goes against the brand’s philosophy of being “open, sincere, and honest”—in other words, frank. Still, an NDA is an NDA, so there’s not much to do about that, but whiskey sleuths can try to at least narrow down where the whiskey comes from by eliminating sources that don’t require NDAs. “[Another non-distilling producer] is literally the last thing the industry needs,” Crocker told me on a recent call. “But the opportunity that I saw was that, as competitive and cluttered as the bourbon category is, it’s predominantly had one story, one strict narrative… It’s always been that family legacy story, that origin story, some grandpappy’s family recipe passed on from generation to generation.”

That is not what Frank August is. There is no backstory about a long-lost family recipe—this is just Kentucky bourbon that is packaged in a very pretty, minimalist, modern-looking bottle. The core lineup has a small-batch version, which Crocker says is literally a small batch of 10 to 15 barrels that he selects and blends, as well as a single barrel version. Both are, to be quite honest, just fine. They are good, but there is a whole lot of good bourbon in our whiskey-saturated world. Then there is the Case Study series, in which Crocker tries out some different tactics as far as maturation, mashbill, and blending, and this is where things get interesting. There have been three previous releases: a bourbon finished in mizunara oak, a bourbon finished in a PX brandy cask, and the brand’s first rye whiskey.

The latest release is Case Study: 04, 4x Oaked, Proofed in Barrel, Double Oaked. Let’s unpack what that all means. This is a four-barrel blend of Kentucky straight bourbon and Kentucky straight rye. Each batch consists of two double-oaked barrels of bourbon and two double-oaked barrels of rye (meaning the whiskey was put into a fresh batch of new charred oak barrels for a secondary maturation), hence, 4x Oaked. Then the blend is proofed in barrel, meaning water is added to proof it down when it is still in the cask, not before bottling as is usually done. The whiskey then aged for another 12 to 14 months, allowing it to continue to soak up flavor.

Visually, this doesn’t immediately jump out as a double-oaked whiskey, which usually has a very dark color. The liquid is more of a deep amber instead of darker brown. But on the nose, all of that oak really starts to jump out, with notes of cinnamon and dusty leather. The palate is where it all comes into play, however. There is a burst of dark berries and stone fruit, along with dark and milk chocolate and espresso beans. That is followed by vanilla, banana, oak, and tobacco, all buttressed by a layer of black pepper and baking spice. There is a lot going on in this whiskey indeed.

There are other bourbon-rye blends out there, from brands and distilleries like High West, Knob Creek, and TX Whiskey. And there are other double-oaked whiskeys, with the most famous perhaps coming from Woodford Reserve. But I don’t think there has really been one that combines both of these worlds that is quite like this. When you’re a smaller brand without a distillery trying to compete with 100 others, sometimes just being good isn’t enough–you have to innovate. With this new release, Frank August has succeeded in delivering on both fronts.

Score: 89