Bourbon's Rule Breaker

Barrell Craft Spirits creates some of America’s best whiskeys without ever distilling a drop. Now bad-boy bottler Joe Beatrice is taking a shot at becoming more than a cult blender.

- Fred Minnick

When the 2017 winners of the San Francisco World Spirits Competition were revealed, the judges looked at the Best Bourbon with astonishment. Was the name a typo? Who made it? And can we get a bottle?

The winner, Barrell (two Ls, not a typo) Bourbon Batch 011, was the independent bottler’s coming-out party to the world, but the man behind the whiskey, Joe Beatrice, was well known to many of those judges, having pioneered websites for spirits brands.

From the late 1980s to 2008, Beatrice’s New York company, Blue Dingo Digital, created the first online footprints for such brands as Jose Cuervo. Now with Barrell Craft Spirits, he’s revolutionizing the industry again as a blender, acquiring casks from multiple distilleries and mingling them to create award-winning whiskeys and forcing heritage distillers to rethink their methods.

And it all began with a simple distillery tour. On November 11, 2012—Beatrice remembers the exact day—at the Tuthilltown Spirits Distillery in upstate New York, he decided to jump into the bourbon boom, embarking on the improbable journey of Barrell Craft.