George Dickel and Friends
How the Longstanding Tennessee distiller Became the Cool Whiskey on the Block
Used to be, the only time you heard from George Dickel—the second biggest names in Tennessee Whiskey (the first is Jack whatshisname)—was when they ran out of something.
Back in 2007, there was a much-publicized temporary shortage of the George Dickel’s Old No. 8 flagship brand, owing to liquor giant Diageo shutting down the Cascade Hollow distillery for a few years to reduce its built-up inventory. It was one of the first of the big Whiskey-Shortage Stories of the modern era, a publicity gambit that has since become old hat. (Cocktail footnote: the brief disappearance of No. 8 from shelves is the reason why the modern classic cocktail Benton’s Old-Fashioned is not made with Dickel. Sorry, George. Bad timing.)
Otherwise, Dickel showed up in the news only when it was part of the perennial feature stories about Tennessee Whiskey, what it was and how it was different from Bourbon. You kind of had to include Dickel in such stories, as it and Jack Daniel’s where the two major practitioners of the style.
Things have changed. Dickel now releases new products with the regularity and restlessness of a craft spirits producer. Let’s run ‘em down:
May 2019: Dickel released a Bottled-in-Bond expression in what would become an annual release.
June 2021: Dickel slaps the word “Bourbon” on a new bottling for the first time.
November 2021: Dickel collaborates with newbie RTD company Social Hour on a new canned cocktail, Harvest Whiskey Sour.
November 2021: Dickel collaborates with Leopold Bros., a Colorado distiller, on a rye blend using their new Three Chamber Rye.
The difference at Dickel is who’s in charge. Nicole Austin was hired as master distiller in March 2018. Austin got her start at Kings County Distillery in Brooklyn, later working for the Tullamore D.E.W. brand in Ireland, and found time in between to help start the New York State Distillers Guild and American Craft Spirits Association along the way. It’s an eclectic resume and she brought that anything-goes, trailblazing approach to the staid Tennessee distillery.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I can’t keep track of them all,” said Austin, when I asked her the exact birthday of one of her new whiskey children.
Austin said it was her intention from the start to bring some much-needed and much-deserved attention to the Dickel brand.
“It definitely was my plan,” she said. “We’re this great American heritage whiskey producer, but people didn’t seem really that aware of it or appreciated it. That was certainly my goal with all these whiskeys, not to just put good whiskey into the world, but to make a bit of splash doing it. I wouldn’t say we’re done, but it’s working. More people are approaching Dickel with a spirit of curiosity and open-mindedness, instead of thinking they already know everything that our whiskey is about.”
Bottled-in-Bond
The first sign that Austin would be steering Dickel in a different direction came a year after she was hired. Many American whiskey producers already had a Bottled-in-Bond expression, an old labeling of American whiskey that had become newly popular with 21st-century bartenders and drinkers, mainly because of its higher abv (50%). But Dickel had not.
“That one was not easy to convince people about,” recalled Austin. “It was a bit of a departure. I really stuck to my guns on that one, because it was important to me. I felt I had a point to make about the quality of the whiskey we had. Bottled-in-Bond is a definite statement. If you like it, you have to admit you like Dickel.”
There have been three iterations of the Bottled-in-Bond label so far. The fourth will be released this summer.
George Dickel Bourbon
Why on earth would George Dickel—a name synonymous with Tennessee Whiskey—put out a bottle with the word “Bourbon” on it? Yeah, sure, Bourbon and Tennessee Whiskey are virtually indistinguishable in terms of production method. But if you’re a known quantity as Betty, why try to be Veronica? You’re just going to confuse Archie the Consumer.
“It’s a conversation I’d been having,” explained Austin. “‘Tennesse Whiskey is Bourbon; it’s a regional type of Bourbon.’ That kinda felt like banging my head on a brick wall. I was not going to get anywhere with that. You know what? Just put it on the label.”
The idea came to her after a review of all of Dickel’s maturing whiskey that Austin conducted shortly after starting work at the distillery.
“I made a really big effort to sample everything we had. That’s thousands of samples. I was surprised to see that, while we certainly had a lot of whiskey that exemplified that Tennessee whiskey style, I also found a lot of whiskeys, that, just in the Excel file where I kept my notes, I thought, ‘This is classic Bourbon.’”
With every repeat review of Dickel stock, she found that those impressions held. A chunk of Dickel juice tasted a lot like Bourbon to Austin. Same mash bill, same yeast, same distilling process, but a big Bourbon taste. So she bottled it and called it Bourbon. The name is based solely on her flavor-profile call. Nothing else.
“As you say, it’s quite controversial to choose to call it that,” she admitted. “It’s the best descriptor I can possibly think of. It really distinguishes why this is different from our existing whiskey.”
The brass as Diageo needed some convincing on that one. It was, after all, a significant shift in the product line, not unlike Heinz getting into the mustard business. (Remember that?)
“That one was not easy,” said Austin. “It took a long time. It’s a pretty big deal. The intent is this is going to be always available, a reliable product. So a lot more people put their eyes on that. There were many opinions”
Did she ever worry, given consumer thirst for Bourbon, that the new Bourbon would eventually eclipse Dickel’s Tennessee Whiskey products in sales, potentially triggering an identity crisis for the brand? Austin laughed.
“Talk about a good problem, man,” she said. “If I ever sat in a meeting where someone yelled at me for selling too much…”
Social Hour Harvest Whiskey Sour
Social Hour made an impact in summer 2021 when it launched its initial line of canned cocktails. Created by cocktail world veterans Julie Reiner and Tom Macy, the brand had a good pedigree. But it’s follow-up was arguably even bigger news: a canned whiskey sour using 13-year-old George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey!
I mean, a 13-year-old whiskey is news on its own. Who puts it in a canned cocktail?
“Candidly, it’s a lot of fun,” said Austin. “It’s irreverent. It’s playing with the idea of being overly precious with your whiskey. It’s poking fun at the idea at what it’s for. Just because it’s in a can doesn‘t mean it should suck.”
Austin was interested in canned cocktails and had been toying around with some recipes, when she hit a wall.
“Pretty quickly I realized that making a good cocktail is really hard! Why I thought I would be good enough to do something that’s even harder, which is make one that is in a can that is shelf stable and in a big batch...”
So, she called her old pal from Brooklyn, Tom Macy. They decided to collaborate and Austin sold Social Hour a batch of 13-year-old juice.
“It's definitely not was I was expecting,” said Macy, “but when I found out that could be an option I didn't question it. Doing something with an age statement was one of Nicole's ideas from the start. We wanted to do something that pushed the boundaries of premium RTD cocktails.”
The Harvest Whiskey Sour was a one-off, but Macy and Austin hope to keep working together.
George Dickel and Leopold Bros. Collaboration Blend Rye
As exciting and unexpected as all of the above bottlings (and one canning) may be, the most audacious and newsworthy of Austin’s recent projects is arguably this one-of-a-kind blend. Experimental distiller Todd Leopold had been working for a decade on his unique Three-Chamber Rye—a recreation of an old American style of rye that involved him commissioning the creation of an extinct style of still. And then, just six months after the mysterious miracle liquid was finally revealed to the public, there appeared a collaborative bottle in which the Three-Chamber Rye was blended with George Dickel Rye.
To put it mildly: What the hell?
Austin told the story:
“He’s been working on this project for nearly as long as I’ve known him. It’s a labor of love. It’s a decade in the making for him and I’ve been really following along with it. He shared a sample of the three-chamber rye. It’s a pretty intriguing whiskey and it’s such a big whiskey. He called me. His ultimate goal with creating the three-chamber rye was really to restore this historical spirit and his research shows that it was commonly blended with a column-distilled rye. To truly achieve that final goal of restoring this spirit style he need to obtain a column distilled rye. He called me asking me to find him some. And I said, ‘Actually, I have some.’”
Austin created the base Dickel rye blend to use and shared it with Leopold. He did the same. They started doing some blending of the two bases. Blending samples were mailed back and forth between Tennessee and Colorado.
Austin won’t say what the blended ratio between the two whiskeys is, because it’s based on a sensory standard, not a number. “If do more of this, I want to match the standard, so the ratio may change.”
The whiskey is a limited release, though both hope to make more. Ironically, there is more of the Dickel-Leopold collaboration on the market than the actual Three-Chamber Rye.
Once the Social Hour and Leopold Bros. collaborations hit the streets, Austin began to get a lot of calls from other makers, wanting to work with Dickel. That’s fine with her.
“Very good problem,” she said. “That’s exciting. More collaborators!”
Good. Here’s my contribution. I made a Manhattan with the Dickel Bourbon. The whiskey and vermouth collaborated very well.
Thanks for the great piece on Dickel!! The Dickel 12 is one of my faves and the rye is solid as well….
Fast becoming a favorite