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For more than a decade, Widow Jane Distillery in Brooklyn has been sourcing bourbons from other distilleries around the country, aging the barrels further, and then bringing that bourbon to proof using limestone water from the Widow Jane Mines 100 miles north in Rosendale, New York. The distillery’s story centered on its water: “it takes sweet water from tough rock to make great whiskey,” the company states on its website.
The process worked. Widow Jane racked up awards and became a cherished bourbon. There’s an art to sourcing and blending barrels, and the distillery emerged as one of the best in the country at doing so. Yet there wasn’t a bottle that was 100% distilled by the Widow Jane team since it was founded in 2012. Until this summer with Baby Jane Bourbon.
The highlight of the whiskey is in the name: Baby Jane corn, a proprietary heirloom corn that’s distilled in Kentucky (Heaven Hill purchased Widow Jane in 2022) and the Widow Jane distillery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, before being blended and bottled. According to the company, it’s “thought to be the first nationally-available bourbon made using a proprietary heirloom corn.”
Baby Jane Bourbon has been in the works nearly since Widow Jane was founded, and it was worth the wait. Whether you’re a fan of grain-to-glass distilleries, love Widow Jane’s other releases, or you’re just a regular bourbon drinker, Baby Jane Bourbon belongs on your bar cart for a go-to whiskey that has an interesting story, delightful taste, and comes in at a very affordable price point.
ABV: 45.5%
Price: $49.99
Where it’s available: Total Wine and other major retailers
How Baby Jane Bourbon Is Made
This distinctive whiskey has been a long time coming. New, proprietary types of corn don’t pop up overnight, after all. Widow Jane head distiller Sienna Jevremov and operations lead Michele Clark started looking into corn varieties in 2013. Heirloom corn seeds from across the country were selected and sent to John Gill, who owns a farm near the Widow Jane Mines.
Bloody Butcher Red—a variety loved by other farm-to-bottle distilleries as well—and Wapsie Valley corn varieties grew well, and ended up cross pollinating for a unique hybrid. Four years of selecting and replanting the best kernels on the hybrid plants eventually created a consistent new corn strain that they named Baby Jane.
The corn is slowly cooked, then fermented and distilled in the 1,000-liter pot and column hybrid single pass still in Brooklyn. A similar process goes on in Kentucky as well. It’s then aged in charred, new American oak barrels for four to six years. The final distillate is finally non-chill filtered and proofed down to 45.5% ABV with limestone water before being bottled.
What Baby Jane Bourbon Tastes Like
The vast majority of bourbon, and almost all of the bourbon produced at scale, is made using commodity corn. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does lead to similar flavor profiles across the board. Small distilleries have been experimenting with the way that unique corn varieties impact flavor, and the best varieties of heirloom corn bring in a more creamy mouthfeel and flavors that simply aren’t present in the mass-market corn available.
All you have to do is taste a whiskey made with heirloom grains to appreciate the difference. Baby Jane Bourbon is no different. The aroma is slightly briney and reminiscent of honey. The taste follows through with ripe, creamy fruit, as well as the barrel notes that often define a bourbon like caramel, baking spices, and vanilla. The flavors linger after each sip.
The modest price makes this a tempting whiskey to mix into your favorite bourbon-forward cocktails. I found it most enjoyable neat, however, as the proof isn’t too aggressive for casual sipping and allows the full range of flavors to shine through.
Why You Should Add Baby Jane Bourbon To Your Bar Cart
Bringing out a bottle with an actual story, versus some ambiguous connection to pre-Prohibition distillers or resurrected history, is always a fun choice when drinking with friends. That’s only true when the whiskey also tastes distinctive. The only downside is that these bottles typically cost enough that you want to limit the bottle to special occasions. Baby Jane Bourbon has the flavor and story, but lacks the high cost.
“With this whiskey, we wanted to break the perception that truly distinctive bottles with special stories have to be cost prohibitive to the point that you’re afraid to open them,” Jevremov said in a statement. “Baby Jane pushes the boundaries of what raw ingredients can deliver and sets a new standard for go-to sipping bourbons.”
I couldn’t agree more.
