Bulleit Just Tore Up Its Recipe for this Special Smoked Bourbon
American whiskey has been flirting with smoked grains for years—peat‑smoked bourbons from Brooklyn, smoked‑malt single malts from the Southwest, on‑farm smoked barley from Nevada. But Kentucky bourbon has mostly stayed out of the smoke.
Bulleit’s new limited release, Bulleit Bourbon Mesquite Smoked Malt ($50), steps directly into that space, building a straight bourbon around mesquite‑smoked barley instead of the rye that usually defines the brand’s mashbill.
It’s the first Bulleit Bourbon to drop rye entirely. In its place in the mashbill is 30% mesquite‑smoked malted barley, 65% corn and 5% malted barley. The whiskey is still Kentucky straight bourbon—aged at least six years in new charred oak—but the recipe is different from anything Bulleit has released before.
Courtesy Bulleit Frontier Whiskey
It originated Diageo’s R&D lab in Connecticut, where Whiskey Innovation Lead Phil Gelineau spent years experimenting with smoked malts.
“We thought about making it into a single malt proposition, making it all 100% mesquite malt,” he said at the liquid’s debut at the Bourbon Classic in Louisville. “I’m so glad we didn’t do that, because it would have just punched you in the face with the amount of smoke.” Early tests, he said, tasted “a lot like mezcal” before six years in oak layered in the vanilla, cream, and wood notes that sit on top of the smoke.
The final mashbill ended up being what Gelineau calls “almost like a one‑to‑one swap out between rye and mesquite smoked malt.” Instead of Bulleit’s familiar rye spice, the whiskey leans into caramelized sugar, warm mesquite smoke, sweet vanilla, and oak, with a light, barbecue‑tinged finish. Bottled at 93 proof, it’s built to carry the smoke without overwhelming the palate.
Courtesy Bulleit Frontier Whiskey
Smoked‑grain bourbon isn’t common, but it’s not without precedent in American whiskey. Kings County Distillery in Brooklyn makes a Peated Bourbon, which is made with peat-smoked malted barley. That whiskey borrows from Scotch tradition, using Scottish‑kilned malt to bring campfire and barbecue notes into a high‑corn mashbill.
But peat and mesquite aren’t interchangeable. Peat smoke tends to be earthy, maritime, and medicinal—the classic Islay profile—but that can shift depending on the vegetation in the peat bog; peat with a lot of heather, for example, can take on a more floral quality. Mesquite, by contrast, is often more intense, sweeter, and more aromatic, tied to Texas pitmaster culture rather than Scottish bogs. And in both cases, how the smoke shows up in the final spirit depends on how much smoked grain is used in the distillate and how heavily that grain was smoked.
Related: Andy Roddick Says This $200 Bourbon Taught Him the Biggest Lesson as a Whiskey Entrepreneur
American distillers have increasingly turned to regional woods—mesquite, applewood, beechwood. Some producers have taken the idea even further. Frey Ranch in Nevada, for example, smokes and malts its own barley on‑site in a custom smoker built from an old silo, even creating peat from local plant matter.
Another example comes from the Southwest: Arizona’s Whiskey Del Bac, which has built its identity around mesquite‑smoked American single malts. Their whiskeys use malted barley smoked over mesquite wood, and are focusing on the terroir of the desert.
Bulleit’s entry into that space seems to be a first for Kentucky bourbon at this scale. Major producers haven’t typically used mesquite‑smoked malt inside a bourbon mashbill, and this release brings that smoked‑grain approach into a Kentucky straight bourbon in a way I haven’t really seen before.
For Bulleit, the release fits into a longer arc of experimentation. “We always try to find ways to continue to push the boundaries for ourselves,” said Doug Kragel, Director of Whiskey Brand Homes & Hospitality. “That's the frontier of it for us. We’re pushing on what we expect this bourbon category to be as much as possible.”