Woodford Reserve gives its rye the Double Oaked treatment, priced at $55

Woodford Reserve has added a rye to its Double Oaked lineup, the first time the Kentucky distillery's signature secondary maturation has been applied to anything other than bourbon. The expression, called Woodford Reserve Double Oaked Rye, launches this month at select retailers nationwide with an SRP of $55.

The whiskey spent somewhere between five and seven years in initial maturation before moving into a second set of new barrels for up to a year. Those barrels were heavily toasted and lightly charred, a deliberate contrast to the treatment the Double Oaked Bourbon receives while chasing a different result.

The mashbill is Woodford's rye recipe of 53 percent rye, 33 percent corn, and 14 percent malted barley. That places it in the 'just legal' style common among Kentucky rye whiskeys, where rye barely clears the required majority rather than dominating the grain bill.

Like virtually all of Woodford's core expressions, the new rye is bottled at 90.4 proof, or 45.2 percent ABV. The brand has held that strength across its range since the mid-nineties, when the Versailles distillery began making whiskey under Brown-Forman ownership.

Master distiller Elizabeth McCall, who succeeded longtime distiller Chris Morris in 2023, described the release as the point where rye meets the richness of Double Oaked. McCall said the team carried the same meticulous attention to barrel finishing that defined the bourbon over to the rye category, creating an unexpected, complex, and incredibly flavorful whiskey.

The distillery blends liquid from Versailles with whiskey from Brown-Forman's far larger Shively Distillery.

How Double Oaked began

The Double Oaked program dates to 2012, when Morris launched the original bourbon and let it rest roughly a year in a second set of new charred oak barrels after initial maturation. The finishing infuses the whiskey with deeper, richer flavor drawn from the fresh oak.

In 2015 the distillery pushed further with Double Double Oaked, which spends twice that time in a new charred-oak set. That expression started as a very limited Distillery Series bottling before becoming an annual, less limited release; the most recent one arrived last January.

The rye breaks distinctly from those bourbons on the palate. The core banana and fruit notes that mark Woodford are present, joined by maple, black pepper and dried fig. Oak, leather and dark chocolate round out the finish, evidence of that second pass through fresh barrels.

Woodford Reserve itself remains best known for bourbon, produced in Kentucky for roughly thirty years under the stewardship of a master distiller lineage that passed from Morris to McCall in 2023. The rye line has held a core expression and a handful of limited releases until now.

At $55, the Double Oaked Rye lands in reachable single-bottle territory for a finished whiskey, cheaper than many limited releases and near the core range's pricing. It also broadens a brand that has until now confined its best-known aging trick to one grain.

We have written before about the most expensive whiskeys to Everdrill the category's ceiling, where rare bottlings run far into five figures and beyond. This release is at the opposite end of that spectrum: a production whiskey meant to be opened, not held as an asset.

The move mirrors the wider play at Woodford to stretch proven formats across its portfolio rather than invent new lines. Double Oaked, then Double Double Oaked, and now a rye carrying the same finish suggests the franchise has more room to run on a name.

No in-body images run with this piece; the story is carried by the bottle and the barrel program itself. The release arrives through select retailers only, not every shelf, which keeps distribution deliberately tighter than the core rye it stands beside.

What the distillery has not said is how long the new rye will remain available. Unlike Double Double Oaked, which moved from a limited Distillery Series batch to an annual release, Woodford has framed Double Oaked Rye simply as a launch with no stated allocation or ongoing commitment.

That leaves the practical question of availability to retailers rather than the distillery.

Bringing barrel-finishing techniques from the bourbon side into rye is a stated direction, and the phrase 'unexpected, complex, and incredibly flavorful' reads as a promise of more to come.

The release goes on sale in November at the stated $55 SRP, with the second-barrel treatment and the five-to-seven-year base spirit doing the heavy lifting on flavor. For a category that Woodford has treated as a side project, it is a fuller statement of intent.