Rickhouses are hard to miss on a whiskey distillery property. Sometimes called rackhouses, these tall, imposing buildings stand stoic and proud, almost sentient, as if they know the secrets lurking within the rows and columns of whiskey barrels tucked behind their walls. Old-school rickhouses look like vintage wood barns or stone buildings lifted from centuries past. Modern iterations resemble the love child of an office building and a greenhouse. Regardless of appearance, they create a stirring sense of place because they are the place — the location where the whiskey ages and evolves.
A rickhouse is an essential part of a whiskey’s maturation process. These wood-framed structures are specifically designed to store and age filled whiskey barrels, which sit sideways in groups of three on racks (“ricks”) traditionally stacked seven stories high, floor-to-ceiling. They also feature ample ventilation to allow for robust airflow. These buildings may look like a repository of future deliciousness to a visitor, but to a distiller, they’re cathedrals of science.
Part of this science involves barrel placement within the rickhouse. According to the pros, putting the right barrel in the right area at the right time imparts a notable difference in the whiskey as it matures. But how much of an impact does rickhouse placement really have on a whiskey’s final character? To find out, we asked Dan Callaway, master blender and vice president of product development at Bardstown Bourbon Company in Bardstown, Ky., to explain why rickhouse placement isn’t a willy-nilly affair.
Air, Heat, and Barrel Placement
Rickhouses exist to carefully control the relationship between the barrels and their surrounding elements. Putting a barrel in the just the right place allows the distiller to optimize this control.
“The rickhouse design has a tremendous impact on where barrels are placed,” Callaway explains. “A rickhouse is a medium to amplify and express the climate and terroir, so we utilize the full spectrum of sizes, angles, materials, and positioning to create new flavors with that influence in mind.”
This relationship can be boiled down to two key components: airflow and temperature. A rickhouse’s ceiling vents promote convective heat transfer. In this process, colder air gets drawn to the bottom of the rickhouse floor, while warmer air rises vertically to its top. This allows barrels on higher levels to face warmer temperatures, which can also be increased by other design elements like direct exposure to sunlight or glass windows that distillers may open during the summertime.
“Air circulation is incredibly important, which is why we invest in rickhouses over less expensive palletized warehouses,” Callaway says. “You need airflow around the barrels to vary the temperature. Think of a palletized, inexpensive warehouse like the ocean. All the liquid is jammed together with no air flow and the barrels will stay at a consistent temperature. In a rickhouse, air surrounds the barrels, creating the desired temperature changes.”
Callaway notes the temperature fluctuation within a rickhouse can create a dramatic diurnal effect, not unlike what wine grapes may experience during their growing season. “It is amazing to see both the temperature and humidity differences between the first floor and the seventh floor,” he says. “We’re currently in a heat wave in Kentucky, and we’re seeing massive temperature swings on the top floor with relatively low humidity. The bottom floor will consistently have a higher humidity than the outdoor temperature.”
Barrels exposed to these warmer conditions will experience a higher level of water evaporation. This results in whiskey with higher proof and bolder, more concentrated flavors. Barrels on the ground floor, on the other hand, will retain more water and lose more alcohol, resulting in lower-proof juice featuring softer, sweeter notes with less burn. This effect underscores the importance of barrel placement, as doing so allows them to create different expressions and build unique flavor profiles.
External Factors Behind Barrel Placement
While airflow and temperature are driving forces behind where a barrel may go in a rickhouse, barrel placement can still be relative. Other factors can come into play, such as rickhouse size and elevation, external weather patterns like heat and prevailing winds, and exposure to sunlight.
Weighing these elements is crucial for Bardstown’s business, since it also produces custom-build contract whiskeys on top of its own bevy of bottles. This compels the distillery to take a bit of a maximalist approach; Bardstown’s sprawling campus features 23 rickhouses, ranging from traditional builds to structures with unique designs and features. “We utilize tile warehouses that maintain heat, glass panels that create huge diurnal swings, large rickhouses for steady development, and smaller custom rickhouses with half-floors at the top to concentrate heat,” Callaway says.
When Callaway and his team are tasked with creating a specific whiskey project, they’ll analyze components like intended flavor profile, proof statement, and maturation to determine in advance the precise location within a rickhouse. For some projects, such as blended whiskeys, they may rotate barrels during the aging process or age the barrels in different locations within the rickhouse to meet specific flavor goals.
Technology can also help mitigate worries of a barrel ending up in the wrong spot. Callaway and his team use sensors in the rickhouses’ aisles, its windows, and the barrels themselves to gauge the temperature and ensure the achievement of the desired maturation effects. How much tech-driven observation is necessary depends on the barrel’s location. “In general, the larger rickhouses will have slower development on the middle and lower floors,” Callaway explains. “Those barrels can be monitored less often.”
Important, but Not the Most Important
Barrel placement in a rickhouse does indeed matter in whiskey production. This may be why some distillers note the rickhouse location on the label as a selling point. But how much does it matter in determining the whiskey’s overall character and flavor profile?
According to Callaway, it’s not the prime mover. However, it is tied for second place. “In the hierarchy of flavor, clean distillate will always be No. 1,” he says. “After that, it is equal parts barrel quality and rickhouse placement. When these three elements are in unison, you can create a tremendous spirit.”
