The original 12 & 13 year ryes were the same whiskey. They were never a marriage of 2 different whiskeys. We kept bottling the 13 year rye over the last 2 years, but stopped bottling the rye about 2 years ago.
The rye we are selling now was tanked in March of this year to stop it from aging. It is the 2 whiskey-marriage rye. We started selling this rye this last spring.
It would probably make more sense to everyone if I had changed the age on the rye labels each year as the whiskey got older, but then I would have to print new labels each year and also re-register in each state a different label each year. So I just kept the age the same.
Why is the age 13 now and not 19? We only have so much of this whiskey. We only have 390 cases to sell worldwide each year of this tanked whiskey. That's why our rye is in such short supply. The plan is to spread what we've got out over 12 to 13 years, believe it or not. That's the plan. If the whiskey starts to oxidize in the tank and changes for the worse, then we'll have to bottling it all up. But since we are spreading this tanked whiskey out over 12 to 13 years, the plan is to start selling a new distillation, (BT), in 13 years. So we are making new rye whiskey this year. It will come out in 13-years. If we had changed our labels to be 19-year rye, then we'd have to wait 19 years for our "new" rye to become of age. This planning for the future in whiskey production is a hard concept for many. I hope this explains it somewhat.
Also, thank for the nice comments. My grandfather and father started all this though. I'm just following their lead.