William LaRue Weller

The Weller brand, or W.L. Weller for “William LaRue Weller” has been around for a long time. A very long time. William Weller was born in 1825 and began his bourbon ventures around 1840. In the mid 1800s, William LaRue Weller is credited with being the first bourbon distiller to replace rye with wheat as the secondary grain in his mash. The addition of wheat to the mash created a softer, creamier bourbon with much more sweet caramel and vanilla flavors instead of the traditional rye spice. This is still true today in releases by Kentucky (and beyond) Distilleries with wheat mashes in their portfolio.

However, the lore behind the story is probably a little more stretched truth than reality. For one thing, W.L. Weller himself was not a distiller. Like many whiskey distributors of the time, he was more of a blender of sourced whiskeys. One place he sourced whiskey from was the Stitzel Brothers who had a distillery in Louisville in the 1870s. The Stitzel Brothers were famous for experimentation and innovation. In fact, they invented and patented the popular rack system of storing bourbon used by almost all distilleries today. And while one of their experimentations was a wheat bourbon, there is little evidence to support that this was a widely available commercial product at that time.

Wheat or not, the first Weller product was introduced around 1850 and the brand gained almost instant traction. The Weller bourbon became so popular that it is said that Weller himself would have to use his own thumbprint in green ink on barrels to ensure that customers were getting the real deal. In fact the whiskey was so popular that it garnered the attention of a young enthusiastic whiskey salesman named Pappy Van Winkle, and it is here that the legend of wheat bourbon truly begins. 

After Weller’s retirement, Van Winkle and a few other salesmen bought up controlling interest in the W.L. Weller company and begin a partnership with the newly formed A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery. Shortly after, prohibition was passed and while they were able to keep production going through “medical prescriptions”, there were limitations on the amount of stored bourbon a distillery could have. Once prohibition was lifted, it was then that the wheat bourbon gained traction. 

With fresh demand and limited supply, the bourbon makers needed a jump start. W.L. Weller officially merged with their producer and formed the Stitzel-Weller Distillery to begin producing their own bourbon. But with no stock, the makers needed to innovate in order to offer a product that was worthy of their new label in a short amount of time. It was then that they brought back the wheat mash. Wheat as a secondary grain creates a sweeter softer bourbon that requires much less aging time to achieve maturity. Now whether this was a lesson learned from past experiments or the revival of a Weller secret is completely up to you and which lore you would like to believe, but the rest is history. 

Bottled as Old Weller and Old Fitzgerald, the Stitzel-Weller wheat mashes were a huge success. Today both the Weller and Old Fitzgerald brands, in addition to the Pappy Van Winkle brand, all still use a wheat mash to carry on the legacy of that innovation. 

Today Buffalo Trace releases their uncut and barrel proof version of that same wheat recipe every fall with the Willam LaRue Weller line.