Garrison Brothers Pre-Sells a 2028 Hye Rye

This is The Cut Weekend. I'm Franklin. Nothing's closing in the next ten minutes, so let's take our time and look back at the week together. It was a week about confidence — who's got it, who's testing it, and who's still waiting to find out.

Start with Monday. Beam Suntory confirmed its Booker Noe plant is running full seven-day shifts again after eight months idle, bringing about 140 workers back to full hours. Their Clermont site is restarting too, slower, around 60 percent capacity, with full production not expected until early 2027. Same mash bills, same yeast — nothing about the whiskey itself changed. What changed is the bet. A company doesn't turn the stills back on unless it thinks the bourbon glut is finally thinning enough to justify making more. That's not a verdict, it's a forecast, and it set the tone for everything that followed.

Then Tuesday, Bardstown Bourbon Company went the other direction — not more bourbon, but a stranger one. They took a ten-year blend of bourbon and rye and finished it in pineapple rum casks for twenty-seven months, more than double a typical finish. Fewer than 350 cases exist, all of them staying in Kentucky. That's a distillery confident enough in its base whiskey to risk a long finish covering it up.

By Wednesday, confidence took a different shape entirely. Old Elk, under its new ownership, shipped three whiskeys at once — a straight bourbon, a wheated bourbon, and a straight wheat whiskey — all aged ten years, all priced at exactly $69.99. Friday's edition circled back to that same release and turned it into a genuine lesson: same distillery, same decade in the barrel, only the grain changing. That's about as clean a mash-bill comparison as a shelf ever offers, and it's a real walk-in-and-buy option in a year that's mostly been lotteries and pre-sales.

And Thursday reminded us access still matters more than anything else. A Kentucky nonprofit, Commonwealth Causes, closed a raffle the same night it opened, six bottles of Pappy Van Winkle for a hundred-dollar ticket, no purchase history or distributor favor required. Different mechanism than everything else this week, but the same underlying question — who actually gets to drink this stuff, and how.

Restart, risk, value, and access — that's the week. Four different companies, four different bets on where bourbon's headed.

Now, the thing I want to sit with a little longer. Garrison Brothers, out in Hye, Texas, opened its first-ever pre-sale this week, for a Hye Rye Bourbon built on 37 percent organic rye. The window opened Sunday, July 27th, and runs through August 10th. Here's the part that makes it interesting — you're not buying a bottle that ships next month. You're reserving one that won't be ready to collect until October of 2028. Two years out. That's not a scarcity stunt, that's a distillery asking you to trust a bottle that doesn't exist yet, at a locked price of $99.99, capped at four per customer. It's a strange kind of patience for a market that usually runs on urgency, and it says something about how Garrison Brothers sees its own cult following — steady enough to wait two years for a name on a list.

If you're out and about this weekend, a couple things are still genuinely reachable. Virginia's Blanton's lottery has free entry open through today, no purchase required — long odds, but a real shot at a bottle most people only read about. And the Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond decanter is still sitting on the walk-up counter at Heaven Hill's Bourbon Heritage Center in Bardstown, one per visitor, no lottery involved.

That's the week in the glass. If The Cut Weekend earned a few minutes of your Saturday, do me one favor — follow the show wherever you're listening, so tomorrow's edition finds you on its own. The full American Whiskey Industry Brief is free every morning at chasingtheunicornpodcast.com. I'm Franklin. Pour something you like, share it with somebody worth sharing it with — and remember, your unicorn is out there.