The way Stephen Rust tells the story, the moment he took a sip, he knew it was the one. “You instantly understand,” he says. “There’s magic.” Rust, the luxury division president at the alcoholic-beverage company Diageo, was in Kentucky bourbon country earlier this year to taste a forgotten, 20-year-old whiskey that had been pulled from the historic Stitzel-Weller distillery’s rick house. With him were Ivan Menezes, the company’s CEO; Larry Schwartz, its president of North America; and Peter McDonough, its chief marketing and innovation officer. Together, in front of a big bow window out of which, legend has it, Pappy Van Winkle himself once shot turkeys during the workday, they all sampled the amber liquid. The whiskey was left over from Diageo’s brief ownership of the Bernheim distillery in Kentucky. Though it had come with the purchase, it hadn’t found a purpose in any of the company’s existing whiskies, and it had been aging well past typical American whiskey age, waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it.

On the spot, the executives behind the world’s largest distiller–maker of Tanqueray, Ketel One, and Johnnie Walker, among many others–decided to bottle this small batch of whiskey. Just months later, in March of this year, Diageo began releasing it as one of the first varietals under a new label called Orphan Barrel. The first offerings are a 20-year-old whiskey called Barterhouse ($75), a 26-year-aged Old Blowhard ($150), and an upcoming version called Rhetoric ($85), which is the same age as Barterhouse but was aged in a different type of barrel.





Whether or not Orphan Barrel’s offerings are great whiskeys is, interestingly, somewhat beside the point. In addition to finding new life for old liquor that would probably have otherwise gone unused, the brand is an exercise in the power of narrative: Diageo wanted to create a story that will make people talk about the product. If the story is good enough, salespeople will relate it to buyers at bars and liquor stores, who can then tell their customers (and, of course, journalists will write about it, as evidenced by the story you’re currently reading).

I used to laugh that my aunt Edna was the only person I knew who ever drank a Manhattan,” Rust says, “until all of a sudden, Manhattans became the second most popular drink besides a martini on a martini list.

Diageo, which was created in 1997 through the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan, acquires liquor brands the way Yahoo acquires startups: frequently and seemingly regardless of genre. In addition to its beer, wine, and other spirit brands, it produces more than 25 whiskeys, including two of the five most widely distributed brands in the category. It is a colossal operation. But like Yahoo, it would rather be perceived through the lens of the small teams it has acquired.





This is especially true in the booming whiskey category, where brands go to great lengths to establish the heritage–invented or otherwise–of their liquid. Johnnie Walker is more than 100 years old, which you may have noticed if you caught its 157-foot luxury yacht retracing old maritime trade routes with the history channel. Bulleit, another Diageo whiskey, was founded in 1987. But, its website reminds us, its founder quit his job to fulfill his “lifelong dream of reviving an old family bourbon recipe.” He was “inspired by his great-great-grandfather Augustus Bulleit” who, “one fateful day, while transporting his barrels of bourbon from Kentucky to New Orleans vanished… his creation nearly disappeared into history along with him.” Diageo recently announced it would be investing $2 million to create a visitor center at 79-year-old Stitzel-Weller, where it will showcase its relatively new Bulleit brand.

As one cynical whiskey reviewer named Rob Theakston put it, “nothing shines quite like a good lacquered coating of embellishment to make a product beam in the eyes of the unsuspecting and trustworthy.”

Diageo didn’t necessarily “discover” the small batch of whiskey at Stitzel-Weller that became Old Blowhard, Barterhouse, and Rhetoric. At any one time, Diageo has around 13 million barrels of aging whiskey in storage. It is has enough experience managing inventory that it doesn’t exactly “forget” what it owns, but sometimes, the whiskey aging in rick houses it acquires doesn’t immediately fit into its products. In the case of the whiskey being used in Orphan Barrel’s first varietals, for instance, some of the Bernheim distillery’s barrels of aging whiskey remained at Diageo’s Stitzel-Weller rick house even after Diageo sold the Bernheim distillery (and the rights to its name) in 1999. It was not enough liquid to turn into a new brand by itself, and it didn’t work in the recipes for Diageo’s other whiskies. So it sat–until Diageo figured out that it had whiskeys with similar stories sitting in its rick houses all over the world that it could introduce as a series under one, continuous brand.