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Modified Templeton Rye Whiskey Labels Surface At TTB

The pending Templeton Rye Whiskey lawsuit settlement, among other things, required labeling changes on the bottle and now those labels have surfaced.
  • Nino Kilgore-Marchetti, founder of The Whiskey Wash, is an award-winning whiskey journalist, expert, and judge
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If you’ve even been remotely following the whiskey class action lawsuit saga which is Templeton Rye Whiskey of late, you know a preliminary lawsuit settlement earlier this month had as one of its conditions a change in how labeling appeared on the whiskey bottles. These new labels have now appeared to have been approved already by the TTB, according to some new filings which appeared over the last few days.

As part of the lawsuit settlement, reported the Chicago Tribune, “the Templeton whiskey label will now feature the words ‘Distilled in Indiana’ on the back and remove the words ‘Small Batch’ and ‘Prohibition Era Recipe’ from the front.” And, indeed, here now are some of the proofs showing exactly that:

Templeton Rye Whiskey New Front label
The modified Templeton Rye Whiskey front label
Modified Templeton Rye Whiskey label back
The modified Templeton Rye Whiskey label on the back of the bottle
Modified Templeton Rye Whiskey label neck
The modified Templeton Rye Whiskey label for the bottle neck

There’s a lot more to the settlement I encourage you to read about both over at the Tribune and also The Des Moines Register, including taking note of the fact those behind Templeton Rye will be owing consumers quite a bit of money in refunds for purchased bottles. There’s also a very recent interview with the brand’s co-founder Keith Kerkhoff over at WhiskyCast worth a listen to, in which Kerkhoff is said to call the settled lawsuits “legalized stealing.” Not exactly a great thing to say when you are trying to maintain brand loyalty in this mess of a situation, if you ask me.

We’ve recently produced a review of Templeton Rye whiskey which I’m in the process of editing right now. Given these new situations, we will likely reconsider our rating of the product as a result, as part of a quality consideration of a product is not just what’s in the bottle, but how it is marketed to consumers as well. Watch for that in the next week.

Finally, I’d like to point you to a very strong blog post renowned whiskey writer Chuck Cowdery put up at his site yesterday, basically blasting Templeton for their practices. His bottom line? “Templeton’s sins have been of degree more than type.” Indeed.

Nino Kilgore-Marchetti

Nino Kilgore-Marchetti is the founder of The Whiskey Wash, an award-winning whiskey lifestyle website dedicated to informing and entertaining consumers about whisk(e)y globally. As a whisk(e)y journalist, expert, and judge, he has written extensively about the subject, been interviewed in various media outlets, and provided tasting input on many whiskeys at competitions.

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