Master of maturation Andrea Wilson and master distiller Dan McKee are the duo behind every Michter's whiskey.
Across the American whiskey landscape, distilleries are usually headed up by a single person—the master distiller. In Scotland and Japan, there’s a heightened emphasis on blending, begetting more master blenders who either run the show entirely or work in tandem with the master distiller. Either way, there’s usually one person at the top—which makes Michter’s something of an anomaly. The Kentucky distillery harnesses the power of two—master distiller Dan McKee and master of maturation Andrea Wilson, who’ve crafted the distillery’s whiskeys side-by-side for nearly a decade now.
So how exactly does this partnership work—how does daily decision-making take shape? It all starts with McKee, who handles the first phase of production; he makes the calls on grains and yeast (at least, when it comes to releases outside the core lineup), and shepherds the whiskey through fermentation and distillation. Once there’s pure distillate to work with, Wilson enters the scene. From there, the pair studies the characteristics of the unaged spirit—there might be fruit, some florals, oiliness, graininess, and whatever else—that help determine which wood to use for maturation. “Do we want to lift up the fruit?,” muses Wilson. “Or do we want to try and extract some different characteristics from the wood, like caramel sweetness or vanilla, maybe some spice or darker flavors like chocolate and espresso? Once we make these decisions, we can start to design the wood that’s needed to help achieve that final goal.”
It’s during this stage that the majority of dialogue between Wilson and McKee takes place, as they decide what the perfect barrel will look like. Michter’s seasons and air dries its wood anywhere from 18 months to 5 years, and that seasoning time is adjusted based on the pair’s parley; after seasoning, the barrels are toasted ahead of being charred, and Wilson and McKee also interface here to determine toast profile and char level. “There’s a lot of back and forth between us at this point, and we’re not afraid to express our opinions to each other…even if we don’t always agree,” McKee says with a laugh.
Disagreements are the exception and not the norm, even as the two differ in their whiskey preferences—Wilson tends to favor bourbon, while McKee is more partial to rye. But since they largely adhere to a Michter’s house style, personal preference isn’t at stake, and thus not in the way of their partnership. “Many of us here are creative, but we’re not trying to make a whiskey that’s tailored to me or Dan specifically,” explains Wilson. “There’s this rich, delicious house style that Michter’s fans have come to expect, and so for us, a lot of the collaboration is a check and balance to make sure we’re doing our best to meet that style.”
She points to one of her all-time favorite whiskeys she’s made alongside McKee—Celebration, the distillery’s most luxurious release, a blend of Kentucky straight bourbons and ryes aged anywhere from 10 to 30-plus years. While McKee might want more spice, and Wilson might want more caramel sweetness, they tune the whiskey to that ultimate expression of Michter’s that Celebration represents.
For all the older releases in addition to Celebration, like Michter’s 10, 20, and 25 year old whiskeys, Wilson’s expertise shines bright, as she ushers the barrels through exceptionally long maturation lengths that were once thought difficult if not impossible in Kentucky. She makes the call if the clock has to stop on a barrel, and it gets moved to a stainless steel drum; she decides if a barrel needs to go to a different part of the warehouse; and she can discern when heat cycling is beginning to have diminishing returns on an older barrel. She and McKee taste barrel samples together throughout the year, to get a grasp on how compounds are developing, and make collaborative decisions about the given whiskey’s future.
Even as a house style happily takes center stage, McKee and Wilson are looking forward to flexing their creative muscles with whiskeys still unreleased from the distillery’s Fort Nelson venue on Louisville’s Whiskey Row. Here, the original Pennsylvania Michter’s pot still is in place and active, having restarted production back in January 2019. Local grains grown at the Michter’s farm in Springfield, Kentucky are the star of the show, and, in a twist from the production process that governs the distillery’s core whiskeys, McKee and Wilson collaborate right from the start, even in choosing the mashbills. “With Fort Nelson, myself and the team will come up with a recipe, but we’re always going to ask Andrea for input,” says McKee. “We want this percentage of this grain and this of that grain, but what are her thoughts? If we use these grains and this yeast, what barrel is best to achieve the outcome we want?” Wilson adds that those whiskeys are still a few years away from release and that they’ve skewed more experimental.
No matter the whiskey they're making, McKee and Wilson frequently point to the efforts of the team at large at Michter's, crediting the work of many in getting the whiskeys across the finish line. "At Michter's there's a recognition of an incredibly complicated series of processes from beginning to end—we have a master distiller and a master of maturation and a team behind us because as important as the distillate is, we also think the wood is a final ingredient in the process that's also so important and involves a great many details," says Wilson. "The culture here has been built by a team as one of collaboration, where we work tirelessly to challenge each other."
