Part of the joy of being a bourbon fan comes from tracking down and getting to experience rare special releases that are difficult to find. Unfortunately, some of them never make it to Nashville or fly off the local liquor store shelves so quickly that unless you're buddies with the store owner, you'll probably never see them, much less taste them. Favorites like Old Forester Birthday Bourbon, Elmer T. Lee and the mythic Pappy Van Winkle are talked about much more than they are actually drunk, but that doesn't stop them from being sources of excitement when they are released.

At Woodford Reserve, distiller Chris Morris has released innovative whiskeys on a yearly basis as part of their Master's Collection, with unusual grain blends, mash bills and exotic finishes. But these are the types that come and go quickly and are difficult to source. Partially as a response to this difficulty and also in an effort to encourage bourbon tourism, Woodford has come up with a new idea to push the spirit of innovation at the distillery forward with new releases they are calling the Distillery Series.

When the distillery opened in 1996, they included a Visitors Center, becoming only the second Kentucky bourbon maker to invite guests into their production facilities. Since then, many other distilleries have opened their doors and reaped the benefits of sharing their histories and traditions as art of facility tours. It's only a a drive of a little over three hours to Woodford's distillery in Versailles, Ky., and the tour and tastings make it well worth the effort.

But now visitors will have the opportunity to be the only aficionados to be able to purchase these new products. Unlike the Master's series where recipes do not repeat, so when they're gone, they're gone, the new Distillery Series will include up to six new releases per year which may repeat if reception is positive. Available in 375 ml bottles in the $50 range, they're not cheap, but they do promise that they'll be special.

This week I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people outside of the distillery to sample their first two releases in the Distillery Series: Double Double Oaked and Sweet Mash Redux.

I'm already a big fan of the standard Woodford Reserve, and you can usually find a big bottle on my home bar. The Double Oaked is more of a special treat because of its price and the fact that it's probably too good and too bold to include in my nightly Old Fashioned. OK, my nightly Old Fashioneds.

Double Oaked takes standard Woodford that has been aged for seven years and transfers it to another new barrel that has been toasted longer and charred less than the standard Woodford oak cask. An additional six to 12 months in this second barrel emphasizes the sweetness in the wood and the whiskey while at the same time accentuating essences of butterscotch, apple, citrus, yeast, malt and nuttiness in the Double Oaked. Think of it as a pecan pie in a glass.

The new Double Double Oak adds yet another year in repose in these special barrels to create a much darker robust bourbon. The triple-distilled whiskey still retains quite a bit of smokiness, but not the peaty smoke of a Scotch whisky. The flavors of bitter dark chocolate and raisin are quite concentrated, and the mouthfeel is quite lovely. It's a bourbon that starts sweet and finishes spicy, just the way I like it!

The second release of the new Distillery Series is called Sweet Mash Redux, which Woodford pronounces as "re-do" since they have experimented with sweet mashes in the past in 2008 as part of the Master's Collection. The traditional sour mash process involves adding a proportion of the previous run of whiskey into each new mash to encourage a more comfortable environment for the delicate yeasts to do their lovely job of converting sugar into alcohol and CO2. With a sweet mash, you pretty much start each batch from scratch, and Woodford does this every time they start up again after maintenance shut-downs.

This creates a more stressful environment for the yeast with a more neutral pH than the acidic sour mash normally contributes. The result is a bourbon that is not as spicy as regular Woodford, with different fruit characteristics that are more muted than normal. While this might sound like a bad thing, in fact it creates a very balanced whiskey with berry and cherry notes taking the place of the usual tropical citrus characteristics. There are still the caramel, brown sugar and vanilla contributions from the wood of the barrel, but the general impression of the wood is a much softer oak and maybe a little cedar as opposed to the strong oak of some bourbons that spend as long in the barrel as Woodford does. It's also not as tannic as usual, which might appeal to white wine drinkers, who are generally less enthusiastic about brown liquor compared to tannic-loving red wine lovers.

The bad news is that these two products didn't go on sale until yesterday, three days after I left. While I preferred the Double Double Oaked (which seemed to be the consensus among the assembled spirits journos), I would happily make that drive back to buy a bottle of either one of these remarkable whiskeys. As they release more new expressions of the Distillery Series throughout the years, there will be plenty of reasons for return visits.

And that's exactly what Chris Morris and Woodford Reserve intend. “With the Woodford Reserve Distillery Series, we used our industry and sensory knowledge to create an eclectic line of one-of-a-kind expressions,” explains Morris. “By pushing the creative boundaries of whiskeys even further, we are inviting our customers who visit our distillery to experience extreme variations of whiskey. We like to think of the Distillery Series as a reward for people coming to Woodford County, coming to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, coming to Kentucky for tourism and have the option to get something they can’t get back home.”