This Revolutionary Bourbon Is Made With Near-Extinct Heirloom Corn You Need to Taste to Believe
One of the first things you learn when you start drinking American whiskey is that bourbon is, of course, made from corn. The grain gives the liquor its signature sweetness that drinkers around the world have come to recognize and love.
Roughly 99 percent of corn grown in the United States is the high-yielding yellow dent variety, which almost all distillers use to make bourbon. If you drive through the midwest in the summer you’ll see acre after acre after acre of yellow dent stalks shimmering in the wind.
But this isn’t how it’s always been. In fact, there were many types of corn that were grown across the country. However, usually the only place you can now find many of these varieties is in the collections of seed banks, which preserve the US’s agricultural past and may hold the key to the future of whiskey.
Courtesy High Wire Distilling
Some pioneering American distillers are working with historians, agriculturalists and farmers to identify and grow heirloom varieties of corn suitable for whiskey. That is the exact route Scott Blackwell and Ann Marshall took when they started High Wire Distilling in Charleston, South Carolina. The couple knew from the get-go that they wanted to source local grains, but sheer locality was only half of the story they wanted to tell.
“I grew up in a family with an agricultural background, and it didn't sit well with me to just source #2 yellow dent corn from South Carolina and have that be the local component of what we were doing,” Marshall says. “We really wanted to do something that would make a bigger impact and value our agricultural partners, but also give us something rich and multi-layered to really grab on to and build the brand story.”
They reached out to their friend Glenn Roberts, founder of South Carolina’s Anson Mills, a company that grows and mills heirloom grains for chefs and home cooks. About a decade prior, Roberts played an instrumental role in establishing the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, which helped revitalize the heirloom rice variety of the same name. And in 2013, he began working with David Shields, an English professor with a passion for agriculture at the University of South Carolina, as well as Dr. Brian Ward, a farmer and a research scientist at Clemson’s Coastal Research and Education Center, to bring more heirloom grains back into circulation and successfully market them.
Courtesy High Wire Distilling
To help High Wire figure out what corn to grow, Roberts baked more than three dozen breads each made from a different variety of the grain. “We went through many of them, and then we got to a Jimmy Red Corn bread and he said, ‘this is the one that was famous for moonshine: James Island Red Corn” said Marshall.
Marshall and Blackwell were sold on using the corn to make whiskey, but the issue was that they needed about 1,000 pounds of the greain to get started. Roberts was used to selling five-pound bags to chefs at a precious price.
Luckily, Ward agreed to plant about two acres of it and Roberts agreed to mill it. “We ended up getting that first bag of red, and it didn’t smell like any of the other corns we’d worked with,” Blackwell says. “It almost smelled like peanut butter, and when we clumped it up in our hands it would make a snowball shape because it had so much starch and oil in it.”
Courtesy High Wire Distilling
The accolades for their 100-percent Jimmy Red bourbon started pouring in before it even went into the barrel. After meeting Julian Van Winkle III, president of the legendary Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, they shipped him a flask of their unaged spirit.
“A few days later, I walk over to my desk and my phone has two missed calls and a text message from Julian,” Blackwell says. “He goes, ‘This is the best white dog I’ve ever had.’”
After aging in new American oak barrels, the whiskey emerged brimming with notes that Blackwell says ranged from peanut brittle and baking spice to blueberries. “I think of the difference between Jimmy Red and traditional yellow corn like white sugar versus Demerara sugar,” Blackwell says. “The sweetness you get from a number of yellow corn bourbons is kind of a one-note, but the sweetness you get from Jimmy Red has a richness and complexity that really stretches your brain to pinpoint it.”
Courtesy High Wire Distilling
The first batch sold out in mere minutes. To meet demand, the couple started working with ever more local farmers to plant Jimmy Red Corn throughout South Carolina. “During the first few years, we were growing five acres,” Marshall says. “That became 14, then 25, and this past year we grew 450 acres. We currently go through about 50,000 pounds of corn every week.”
The increased supply not only means that Marshall and Blackwell can make more bourbon, but it’s allowed them to steadily increase the whiskey’s minimum age to four years. They’ve also released a number of other Jimmy Red expressions, including a bottled-in-bond version.
Of course, making such a unique product doesn’t come without unique challenges. Since there is no malted grain in the mash bill, the High Wire team has to add enzymes to the mash to turn the corn’s starches to sugar. If a heavy storm rolls through South Carolina and destroys a bunch of Jimmy Red (which luckily, hasn’t happened yet), Marshall and Blackwell can’t just source the corn from another state. But the couple has no plans to cut corners any time in the future.
“We’re really proud to have something that’s from here and that we’re now able to revive and put back on the map,” Marshall says. “It’s not something that happens overnight, but neither does whiskey.”