Bottle Basics: High N' Wicked Cask Strength Rye

The latest Bottle Basics - a deep dive into the labels on High n Wicked's Cask Strength KY Straight Rye Whiskey.
All right. So if you ever wanted to know why labels do what they do or what the things on a label mean. That's what we're here for. This is Bottle Basics. I've been shooting this series, and you can go back and watch them, but fair warning. These are long videos because I want to give you a full, deep dive into these products.
Today, we are looking at High n’ Wicked Kentucky straight rye cask strength. Now, this is a seasonal limited release. That means you're not always going to find these bottles on the shelf. When we break down this particular bottle, let's first talk about the definition of what it is, right? It says Kentucky straight rye whiskey… The word Kentucky here for us does mean something. If we put Kentucky on the label, that means that everything has been distilled, matured, blended and bottled entirely in Kentucky.
So we're looking here over top, cask strength over the top here, because this is a signifier that lets you know this is not our standard five year old release. This is the cask strength release, which is a seasonal bottling.
The front label is also slightly different from the standard design on the five year old, which is the flagship bourbon or rye.
Now on here we have the horse iconography and images a little bit larger and more prevalent because this is, as I mentioned, cask strength. So it is bigger, it is bolder, It is a little bit more impactful in flavor. These horses are actually from an original woodcut design from an artist, I believe in Charlottesville, Virginia, that those pieces were gifted to our founder and CEO, Mr. William Lee Lyons Brown the third. So we fell in love with that iconography. And of course, since High n’ Wicked as a brand is named after an old cowboy poem dating back to the 1900s written by Bruce Kiskadon, it just seemed to make that much more sense to tie in this beautiful artwork into the label. By the way, these labels and packages are all being designed, actually for a majority of our brands in our portfolio now, by Watermark Design.