Cooper King Distillery®

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Dark Fired Bourbon Casks

Chris Jaume

WHAT IS A DARK FIRED BOURBON CASK?

A dark fired bourbon cask is a style of cask pioneered by Kentucky’s MB Roland Distillery. It’s the result of maturation of a rare bourbon made using dark fired corn.

The Process

Drawing inspiration from the dark fired tobacco of western Kentucky, the MB Roland team start the process by laying out 130kg of white corn on racks in their tobacco barn. This is then smoked over hickory wood for 5-7 days.

This dark fired corn is then added to the mash bill (45% white corn, 33% dark fired white corn, 17% rye, 5% malt) before being mashed, fermented and distilled under one roof. This produces a smoky new-make spirit (or ‘black dog’), which is then matured in new, 100 litre, American oak casks, with char level 4 (AKA crocodile char).

After 2-4 years’ maturation, the resulting Dark Fired Bourbon has a unique and distinctive blend of sweetness and BBQ smokiness. It’s a delicious, uncut and unfiltered bourbon, and is nigh on impossible to get your hands on outside of the USA, as they produce only 20-30 casks per year.

The MB Roland Story

MB Roland Distillery is Kentucky’s first ‘grain to glass’ craft distillery, located in Pembroke, Christian County, Kentucky, USA.

It was founded by Paul & Merry Beth (‘MB’) Tomaszewski in 2009 when the couple bought an Amish dairy farm. This proved to be a wonderful foundation for a distillery. Paul was their one and only distiller back then; now the distillery has a team of 20!

They pride themselves on producing uncut and unfiltered bourbons and whiskeys, using locally grown white corn. Their decision to use white corn - over the industry-standard yellow variety – is purely based on flavour. White corn was commonly used in the early days of whiskey making and has a sweeter, more delicate flavour profile.

Cooper King x MB Roland

We were introduced to MB Roland’s bourbon in 2019 by distillery friends Neil and Angela. We went over to visit in 2020, and met kindred spirits! Here was another family-run distillery, with a love of craftsmanship and flavourful whisk(e)y. We’ve been partnered ever since.

Thanks to our close relationship with the distillery, their freshly emptied casks are shipped direct to us in Yorkshire, where we fill them with our fruity new-make spirit.

The first Cooper King whisky release to be built around these casks is Embers, released in the autumn of 2024. The intense hickory smoke from the dark fired casks softens over time, creating a velvety whisky with notes of soft woodsmoke and baked apple.

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