What’s up with the mash bill used in the new King of Kentucky Small Batch Collection?

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King of Kentucky doesn’t need any more fuel added onto the hype fire, but I’m seeing one question that keeps popping up about their new Small Batch version that’s due out sometime in 2026. That question is “Did they make a new mash bill?”

If you’re not tracking this confusion, the press release from Brown-Forman has said that the mash bill for this new bourbon will be “75% corn, 15% rye and 10% malted barley.” This is different from the mash bill that the single barrel version of King of Kentucky is known to have – 79% corn, 11% rye and 10% malted barley. That used to be called the Early Times mash bill, but now Brown-Forman is internally calling it the “King of Kentucky” mash bill.

On the flipside, Old Forester’s mash bill contains 72% corn, 18% rye and 10% malt. So that’s not what is going into the new release either. Several theories have been circulating that either Brown-Forman has been sourcing this bourbon from somewhere or that maybe they have been distilling it for another client before using it now. After all, 75/15/10 is a mash bill that is associated with at least 4 other distilleries at this point to include Barton, Heaven Hill, Green River and Bardstown Bourbon Company, so there is a non-zero chance it could be associated with one of them.

But I’ll cut to the chase and tell you what I believe has happened here – I think that Brown-Forman is simply blending the King of Kentucky and Old Forester mash bills together. If you average together the ratios from those two bourbons, you will get something like 75.5/14.5/10, but decimal places look sloppy and confusing, so producers typically revert to even numbers. If you need proof of this, look no further than when those totes of sourced Beam bourbon started to show up around 2019/2020 wearing “78.5/13/8.5” mash bills. They later simplified it to 79/13/8 when a new round of barrels started to be sold to NDPs a couple years later.

Afterthoughts

Before I go, I’d like to comment on one thing that I had always wondered about. Old Forester’s 1870 Original Batch (part of the Whiskey Row series) label had always intrigued me because it called out how George Garvin Brown originally crafted his whiskey by “blending the whiskies of three distilleries’ warehouses.” For the longest time, I thought that passage was trying to hint at the possibility that OF1870 was a blend of three different bourbons – Old Forester, Early Times/KoK and maybe Woodford Reserve (which is the same, but different). Even Old Forester 1924 mentions how Owsley Brown used different mash bills to create Old Forester bourbon.

I think ultimately my brain went into overdrive mode trying to prove that these two products were more than what they actually were, but the fact remains that Brown-Forman has a history of blending together different bourbons to create the best product that they can. It’s kind of fun to see them finally take that step towards giving us a sneak peak at what these two famous recipes will taste like blended together. I hope we all get a chance to taste them once they come out. Oh, and disagree with me all you want, but I’d love to see a King of Kentucky release that’s a Bourye in the future. Just gonna drop that here in case Melissa Rift is reading this!