It was National Bourbon Day yesterday. Fine, technically in the US, but they can’t have all the fun, and the occasion gives us a good excuse to take a closer look at Brother’s Bond Bourbon.
New to the UK in 2026, Brother’s Bond was founded by Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley, best known for starring together in The Vampire Diaries.
Before we go any further, we should probably talk about the celebrity whiskey-shaped elephant in the warehouse.
The strange business of celebrity whiskey
If you’re reading the Master of Malt blog, I’m going to assume you’re a whisky lover. As a fellow whisky lover, I have a thought exercise for you.
Let’s say in 2026, you become a celebrity. Maybe you’ve authored the next Great American Novel, or you’ve written five Bohemian Rhapsodies before breakfast. Perhaps you’re inexplicably massive on TikTok for ranking crisps in historical costume. Fame is weird now.
Regardless, you now have the money, the reach, and the audience to make your own whisky brand. Do you do it? You might hesitate. Maybe you think the market is too saturated. You’re worried about what the comments will say on Reddit. Maybe you live in fear and ultimately care more about strangers calling you a sell-out than the fact you bloody love whisky.
Screw that, right?
You want a whisky with your name on it, and you’re certain you’re going to do it properly. You’re going to care about provenance, quality, flavour, cask management, grain, water, transparency, all the good stuff. Blood, sweat, and tears will be poured into this. You’ll have sleepless nights over that shipment of Mongolian oak casks.
You’re the real deal. Picture it. What it looks like. What it sounds like. Now I’d like you to imagine a celebrity brand trying to sell that dream to you. Do you believe them?
How does a celebrity create a whisky you respect?
Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley. But you knew that, didn’t you?
The bonding of brothers
That is the test for Brother’s Bond Bourbon. Not whether Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley are famous. They are. The Vampire Diaries was a pop culture phenomenon, 172 episodes and over 1bn people have seen it. The question is whether the bourbon has enough substance to outlive the eyebrow raise.
A few of Team MoM joined a Zoom tasting with Ian and Paul recently. It wasn’t a slick sales pitch or a celebrity victory lap. Both were open, thoughtful, and genuinely nerdy about the liquid. They answered everything and showed a level of involvement you don’t always see with famous names on the label.
Paul describes Ian as his other half and longest relationship, meeting in 2009 while getting a fitting for their fangs on “their little TV series” and it’s been a love story ever since for the pair. Paul calls Ian big brother, Ian calls him little brother, like they did on the show. Their characters drank bourbon on screen, the actors did off screen. The first notion of making their own dates back to 2010, season two. “What did we know about starting an alcohol brand,” Ian says. “What do we still know?”.
Whisky is for everyone
Every brand needs a doorway
The duo spent years sharing bourbon and talking about it before the idea became real.
Then came the graft. Distillery visits. Mash bill trials. Tastings. Barrel selection. Tastings. Blending. Sample bottles. More tastings. More sample bottles. Then more sample bottles just to make sure the first sample bottles had not been lying. Ian was surrounded by sample bottles on our call. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. In fact, he quit acting to do it full time. Along with producing and environmental activism. Really.
“I know there’s a lot of celebrity brands. I want you to not put us in that category in that way,” Paul says. “We blended this ourselves. These are mash bills Ian and I put together ourselves, it’s from the ground-up situation. Somebody else didn’t craft us and we slapped our name on it, we built this together.”
Brother’s Bond has an obvious first audience: people who loved Somerhalder and Wesley before they cared about what they drank. There is nothing wrong with that. Every brand needs a doorway. But lord knows whiskey has its fair share of purists and gatekeepers, from the collectors to bartenders and us plain ol’ drinkers. Then all the people who like the idea of whiskey but have never felt properly invited into the category.
Brothers on screen, brothers off
The potential in Brother’s Bond Bourbon
Brother’s Bond is trying to meet both groups at once. Approachability without emptiness. Whiskey to welcome people into bourbon without patronising those who already know it. An antidote for those who think bourbon is too sweet, too simple, it’s just not Scotch. This is not your grandad’s bourbon, in other words, unless your grandad was unusually into regenerative agriculture and four-grain mash bills.
Vincent Hanna, CEO and co-founder of Brother’s Bond, sees opportunity. New consumers, which remains hallowed ground for ambitious drinks brands. The founders also bring a sizable female audience with them, which matters in a category that has too often been framed as a room full of leather chairs, low lighting, and men, men, men.
Not because women need a simplified bourbon, which is a grim little idea that should be taken outside and shot unceremoniously in the back of the head, but because too much of whisky has spent decades caking itself in “gentleman’s drink” guff. Too many brilliant drinkers have been made to feel like they arrived at somebody else’s party.
Paul jokes that men had to drink bourbon to get through the TV series. But behind the joke is a desire to deconstruct bourbon’s old-man stigma. They frame whiskey as something that should bring people together, not make them feel examined at the door.
Life is tough enough, Ian says. It kicks you in the teeth. Your whiskey doesn’t have to.
Remember, whisky is agriculture
Starting in the soil
The regenerative agriculture story is where Brother’s Bond moves furthest away from the usual celebrity drinks playbook. Regenerative agriculture focuses on restoring soil health, increasing biodiversity, improving water retention, and capturing carbon in the soil.
In 2024, Brother’s Bond became one of the first bourbon brands to use regenerative grain in select expressions. Its stated ambition is to create whiskey while preserving the planet for future generations, with a long-term goal of transitioning the bourbon-making process to 100% regenerative practices.
Ian has been an advocate for regenerative farming since 2011 and speaks about it with the kind of barely contained intensity that suggests he could happily talk about soil microbiology until a plant had actually grown before us. Agriculture at scale can sequester enormous amounts of CO2, put it back in the soil, and feed the microorganisms in the ground, he says. Healthier soil, healthier plants, healthier people, healthier economies, healthier planet. The list goes on.
Brother’s Bond has worked with partners whose wider goal is to help reach 100 million acres of regenerative farmland by 2030. The brand says 34 million acres have already transitioned through those partnerships. Brother’s Bond does not want regenerative grain to be a gimmick, it wants this to become the norm.
Mixing is encouraged. Whiskey is fun, remember?
How Brother’s Bond is made
Let’s take a deeper look at production. The grains are hammermill crushed, cooked, and fermented with proprietary yeast in limestone-rich water. The brand references a 10,000-year-old glacial aquifer and deep well water as part of its water source.
MGP Ingredients out in Indiana make the bulk of the whiskey, to Ian and Paul’s spec, while the Regenerative Grain bourbon comes from North Carolina. Distillation takes place through copper column distillation and a copper pot doubler, before maturation in new oak barrels with deep char or custom toast and char profiles.
Char and toast are not the same thing. Heavy char can bring vanilla, caramel, spice, smoke, and colour, but it most importantly smooths off the rough edges. Toast works differently, coaxing out deeper oak sugars and spice before the barrel is charred. With the Regenerative Grain Bourbon, Brother’s Bond relies less on char and more on a proprietary toast profile, allowing the grain and oak to show differently. Ian describes it as seasoning.
How would you create a whiskey brand if you were a celeb?
Can a celebrity whiskey earn respect?
Brother’s Bond has recently joined the Maverick Drinks stable, and director Juan-Marc Correia says there’s growing UK interest in American whiskey as an opportunity for premium bourbon brands. He highlighted the Brother’s Bond Bottled in Bond 7 Year Old, which earned Double Gold and a 98-point score at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition 2025, as an example of the quality the UK trade and consumers could respond to.
The wider brand has momentum too. Brother’s Bond reported around 40% growth over 2025, driven by new distribution partnerships and increased visibility in markets like the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Greece, Austria, Taiwan, and Japan. In a time where most are reducing production or pausing international plans, Brother’s Bond is pushing forward, taking on US$7.5 million investment in 2025.
Ian and Paul also hint at more to come: more age, more wheat-led mash bills, and more exploration. Success is never a guarantee. Repeat purchases are ultimately the mark of success for any whisky. But a celebrity whiskey has to clear a higher bar because the suspicion comes built in. It has to prove the famous person is not the product. The whiskey is the product.
The Brother’s Bond founders don’t really want you to pretend they’re not famous, that’s just silly. They want you to taste past that fact. Right now, there’s no distillery. What there is, is a brand with backbone beyond Hollywood that has a real opportunity to put good liquid in people’s hands at a reasonable price, at a time where a difficult market is making it harder and harder to do that. A brand that can talk grain, farming, flavour, blending, and the social pull of whiskey as something shared like whiskey nerds. Because that’s what the founders are.
Here’s the full range. My favourite is the Bottled in Bond. You’ll see why shortly. And Happy National Bourbon Day. Be sure to have a little of something special in your glass tonight.
The full range is available here
Meet the whiskeys
Brother’s Bond Straight Bourbon
Brother’s Bond Straight Bourbon is the foundation bottle, and it tells you a lot about the house style. It is a four-grain straight bourbon distilled from a mash bill of 65% corn, 22% rye, and 13% wheat and barley. It is matured in deeply charred new oak barrels and bottled at 40% ABV. It’s got multiple gold medals and a few inclusions in Fred Minnick’s Top 100 list.
Paul says that people really love that it’s a four-grain, as it helps separate them from most other bourbons and it offers a different kind of complexity. He talks about the range having something for everyone, and this is the introduction: an easy sipper, great in cocktails, on the rocks, neat. The Bottled In Bond and the Rye are higher proof for those who prefer that. The cask strength of this, the same mash bill, is an awards darling.
Ian says the nose is indistinguishably baked banana bread, like grandma made. “You’re getting that high rye, warm rye, little hint of that cereal grain, but on the back end now you’re getting that nice sweet kick followed by that warm rye finish. That is consistent with every single sip”.
He talks about blending for equal sensory proportion, which he prefaces by acknowledging it sounds like “bullshit California kumbaya”, but essentially means each grain has the room to express its contribution in the blend. “The idea is you get rich honey sweetness, some black tea, baking spice, dried fruit, hints of toasted cereal grain, a little nuttiness comes through, like a walnut with some honey on it, some honeysuckle. That’s a lot out of one glass of whiskey”.
Approachable yes, but with a nuance that even “the snootiest bitchiest, bearded bourbon drinker like myself can try and say – wait, this is a really well crafted spirit. All at 40% ABV, that’s how we’ve been able to win people over,” Ian remarks.
Brother’s Bond Straight Bourbon Tasting Note
Nose: Baked banana bread, jammy fruit, citrus blossom, and earthy nuts roasted with honey.
Palate: Layers of honeyed sweetness, dried fruit, and toasted cereal, with rye spice and black tea nestling beneath.
Finish: Oaken spice, toffee, vanilla, and a touch of nutmeg warmth.
Brother’s Bond American Blended Rye Whiskey
On to the rye, which the founders know is a smaller market by volume, but an exciting one by value. “You’re dealing with the majors. The names here can be a little intimidating,” Ian says. Still, the focus is there. They know what their DNA is (that means keeping the four grains) and the higher 47.5% ABV is to appeal to the purists. They tell us a lot of bars will offer an Old Fashioned with either their bourbon or the rye, and the latter goes down very well, particularly because people aren’t expecting that profile.
Why is it labelled as a “blended rye whiskey”? Well, in a straight rye, all the whiskies need to have a minimum mash bill of 51%. Brother’s Bond uses 4 different mash bills to create this rye, one is super high rye, the other three are beneath 51% but above 20%. This adds up to a mash bill of 77% rye, 16% corn, and 7% wheat and barley, matured for at least four years in deeply charred oak.
Ian says Brother’s Bond isn’t worried that it isn’t a straight rye whiskey because the flavour is what gets people. “It’s additive free, pure as driven snow. It’s aromatic, it’s balanced, it’s structured, the depth of flavour is typically something you don’t get in a rye. With water, you get floral notes, like where the stem meets the bottom of a rose, and those wood sugars. It totally changes it. It’s very special and we’re so excited.”
Brother’s Bond American Blended Rye Whiskey Tasting Note:
Nose: Creamy caramel, raisins, and rich oak join cinnamon, delicately floral notes of rose petal, and a herbaceous touch of mint.
Palate: Sweet candied fruit intensity, hints of ripe pineapple, with waves of creamy vanilla and caramel. Cinnamon sugar and a smidge of After Eight.
Finish: Dark fruits, charred wood, caramelised sugar, and warming spice.
Brother’s Bond Regenerative Grain Straight Bourbon
Brother’s Bond Regenerative Grain Straight Bourbon is made using grains cultivated through regenerative agriculture. It brings together three-year-old bourbon and six-year-old wheated bourbon, with an overall mash bill of 73% corn, 10% rye, 8% wheat, and 9% malted barley. It is bottled at 46% ABV, non-chill filtered, and aged in oak barrels treated with custom toast and char methods. The corn and wheat are 100% regenerative and the plan is for all grains to follow suit in the future.
Ian talks about terroir and seasoning here: grain grown within 5 to 20 miles of the distillery, specific farmers, specific fields, and a proprietary toast profile that lets the oak work more like seasoning. “We rely less on char, which is carbon, the clean stuff. You can pay for the sins of dirty distillation with carbon. We use a lower char here because we toast. That’s the seasoning”.
This is not just the sustainability bottle. That would undersell it. It is the bottle that best shows how grain choice, farming, toast, and local sourcing can change the character of bourbon. For British bourbon drinkers, this offers a different way into American whiskey. It shifts the conversation from sweetness and char to land, grain, and provenance. And it gives Brother’s Bond a point of difference beyond fame.
Brother’s Bond Regenerative Grain Straight Bourbon Tasting Note
Nose: Honeyed corn bread, toasted cereal, floral vanilla, browned butter, and brown sugar.
Palate: Toffee popcorn and sweet baked goods join toasty notes of floral oak, butterscotch, and vanilla, backed by savoury hints of roasted peanuts.
Finish: Mellow sweetness lingers, with oaken vanilla, a touch of ginger, and buttery fudge.
Brother’s Bond Bottled in Bond 7 Year Old Straight Bourbon
“I hate to say this, I don’t want to sound crass, it’s one of the best fucking whiskeys in the world,” – Ian. Not one to mince words.
It’s the highlight for me. The mash bill is 51% corn, 39% rye, and 10% malted rye. The malted rye, Paul says, is the special sauce. It adds depth, spice, and a more polished grain character to what could otherwise be a pretty muscular high-rye bourbon. So far the response has been very strong to this whiskey, from on trade listings to gold medal after gold medal.
It’s a Bottled in Bond American whiskey. That’s a strict legal definition that means the bourbon must come from a single distillery, from one distilling season, be matured in a federally bonded warehouse for at least four years, and be bottled at 50% ABV. Brother’s Bond goes beyond the minimum here, with a seven-year-old straight bourbon bottled without chill filtration. Another one for the purists. Drink it in.
Brother’s Bond Bottled in Bond 7 Year Old Straight Bourbon Tasting Note
Nose: Candied plums and boozy dark cherries join rich oak char, burnt brown sugar, floral honey, and dried herbs.
Palate: Jammy dark fruits, with notes of figs and raisins, butterscotch, and maple syrup. Herbaceous spice gathers beneath, with hints of cinnamon warmth and mint.
Finish: Rich oak char, vanilla, and a hint of leather linger.
