oats | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

are a relatively uncommon grain in the making of distilled spirits, although that was not always the case. They are expensive and, on their own, quite viscous and difficult to work with. However, in a mash with other grains, oats paradoxically can make the mash easier to manipulate, and several distilleries in Scotland and the United States incorporate a small amount of oats in their whisky mashes. This practice is not new: in the early nineteenth century, some scotch whiskies had oats in their mashes, and they were used to supplement the malted and raw barley that went into Irish pure pot-still whiskies until the 1950s, generally making up between 10 percent and 30 percent of the mash (along with smaller amounts of rye and sometimes wheat). See whisky, Irish.

Today, oats are also increasingly popular as an “alt whisky” grain: Beam Suntory and Buffalo Trace have released limited-edition, “oated” bourbons (in which oats replace some or all of the rye as the “small” grain), and some distilleries in the United States, including Koval, Central Standard, and High West, have released whiskies made with pure or predominantly oat mash bills. See Buffalo Trace Distillery.