A Grand Old Age
If you went by the dozens of American whiskeys that start with the word “Old”—Old Tub, Old Home, Old Log Cabin, Old Grand-Dad—you might be forgiven for thinking that Bourbons and ryes have an extensive history for creating antiques of the spirits world.
But you’d be mostly wrong. Scotch makers have long been known for producing whiskies (largely single malts) aged for two, three, four and even as long as six decades. But when it comes to American whiskeys, for most of their more than two-century history they have never been particularly old.
More recently, however, several whiskeys have challenged the norm by more than doubling the concept of what a very old whiskey could be—and with great success. Led by a couple of unicorns—first and foremost the 20- and 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve—producers have bottled a litany of examples that are that old and even older.
Consider the lineup: among them Jefferson’s (30), Heaven Hill (27), Michter’s (25), Eagle Rare (25), Buffalo Trace (23), Rittenhouse Rye (23), Knob Creek (21) and Elijah Craig (21). By comparison, 10- and 12-year-olds, which previously occupied the outer limits of age in American whiskey, seem unremarkable.
Why did it take so long for American distillers to light up to the widely held idea that older is better? The simple answer is they didn’t have to. The places that Bourbon and rye come from—largely Kentucky and Tennessee—enjoy sweltering summer temperatures that hasten interaction with the wood barrels, the source for a huge portion of whiskey’s compelling flavor. Scotch comes from cooler climes with narrower temperature fluctuations between seasons. Add to that the legal stipulation that American straight whiskeys be made in new, charred-oak barrels—other spirits may utilize reused casks—and you have an atmosphere for brisk maturation.
Other manufacturing, marketing and legal wrinkles also have had their effects. It wasn’t until around the turn of the 20th century, that American whiskeys had aging requirements at all. Elizabeth McCall, master distiller of Woodford Reserve, points out that previous to that, unscrupulous whiskey makers could color and flavor their product to make it stand out. “When you started seeing ‘Old’ on the label, it meant that had been barrel-aged,” she says. Old Forester, made by her parent company, Brown-Forman, was the first to bottle and seal Bourbon to assure its quality.
In 1897, the Bottled-in-Bond Act created a category that added rules, among them the stipulation that the whiskey inside had to be at least four years old. In a political atmosphere of protecting the public health, the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906 and a 1909 addendum called for straight whiskey to be at least two years old. If it was younger, then it had to say so on the bottle. “Four years became the standard for a lot of reasons,” McCall says. “Because that’s where you see a lot of symmetry of time in a new charred oak barrel.”
Along with codifying standards for the coveted bottled-in-bond designation, the Bottled-In-Bond act also allowed distillers to defer paying taxes on such spirits for the time whiskey was in bond, a moratorium that ended after the whiskey aged past eight years. When taxes came due, it was hard to justify further aging. A 1958 amendment to the Act extended that maximum tax-free period to 20 years, an incentive that resulted in a spate of what was then considered extra-old whiskeys a decade later. One of those was the 10-year-old Very Xtra Old Fitzgerald release, laid down by Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle, a founder of Stitzel-Weller Distillery, near Louisville. The bottles that remain from that early endeavor typically sell for several thousand dollars at auction today.
Julian Van Winkle died in 1965 and ownership of Stitzel-Weller passed to his son, Julian Van Winkle Jr., who sold it in 1972 with the stipulation that he kept the Old Rip Van Winkle trademark and could buy stocks from the site. Such product was distinct because most Bourbons are made with corn, rye and barley, but the Stitzel-Weller distillery created Bourbon using a grain formula that used wheat in place of rye. Van Winkle Jr. continued the brand and upon his death in 1981, his son, Julian Van Winkle III, became president of Old Rip Van Winkle.
Along with liquid from the Stitzel-Weller facility, the company acquired whiskey from stocks made at other shuttered distilleries, including Glenmore, Yellowstone and Old Boon. The company’s original release was a seven-year-old, but that was not what would make the Van Winkle name famous.
Bourbon had been steadily declining in popularity since the 1960s. With the subsequent availability of extended aged whiskeys, Van Winkle III introduced a 20-year-old called Pappy Van Winkle in 1995, using the now-famous image of his grandfather lighting a cigar for its label. “Everything was available back then,” he says today. “We were floating in whiskey in the late ’80s, mid ’90s.” At the time, the 20-year-old sold for $50, then considered the upper reaches of the segment.
It was in 1998 that the brand Pappy Van Winkle began its rise to cult status and super maturation became a pursuit for drinkers. High ratings didn’t hurt. “It kind of made people open their eyes to something older might be better,” says Van Winkle.
More than opening their eyes, Pappy became the Tickle Me Elmo of whiskeys—everyone wanted it, but few could get it. Today, precious few bottles are allocated to lucky liquor stores to be sold at the nosebleed prices of $360 for 20-year-old and $500 for the since-created 23-year-old. But they’re almost impossible to buy at retail. The alternative is to find them at auction, where they are sold for upwards of $6,000, often to customers who have never sampled Pappy, but know of its mystique.
“We still have so much demand compared to production that we’re not worried about it at all,” says Van Winkle. “In September [the end of the summer aging season], we bottle it up, see how much we’ve got and tell the distributors how much they can have and just ship it out. We could sell everything we’ve got to Kentucky [stores] if we wanted to.”
Van Winkle and his son and marketing manager, Preston, have also extensively provided bottles for charity auctions.
The runaway success of Pappy Van Winkle depended to a great extent on many pieces falling into place. The entire industry had overproduced decades before, so barrels that would have been sold younger in a better market languished in warehouses. By the time Van Winkle bottled them, a whiskey revival was happening in America. “It wasn’t a marketing plan to sell 23-year-old,” recalls Van Winkle. “I just bottled what I like. I had excess whiskey and it was good. So, we made a label for it and it was accepted because it was good.”
He was not alone in such happy accidents. In a time before barrels were tracked with barcodes and computer programs, it was not unheard of for casks to be forgotten or ignored. Just after the turn of this century, Heaven Hill, which makes several brands for private-label customers, discovered it was storing barrels of rye whiskey that had been earmarked for a distributor in Maryland, but never bottled. (Rye’s fortunes had been even sorrier than Bourbon’s at the time.) The company approached the customer who didn’t have an interest in such an old whiskey, so Heaven Hill decided to take it to market themselves. It went on to create 21-, 23- and 25-year-old versions with its own label, Rittenhouse Rye, a brand that is usually bottled at four years. It was a resounding success.
The company has since become one of the foremost purveyors in the age category. Heaven Hill master distiller Conor O’Driscoll describes being surprised at how extraordinary age could affect the flavor of Bourbon and thinking: “Who knew that American whiskey could taste this way? It tasted like old whiskey but in a really good way . . . . It was a lot more serendipity than strategic.”
Older isn’t always better with Bourbon or rye. Because Bourbon ages two to three times faster than say Scotch, it can become too tannic, ruining the results. On another occasion O’Driscoll says “we had some really old Bourbon and we tasted it and honestly two-thirds of the barrel were undrinkable. They tasted like the proverbial dirty old stick. We didn’t want to put the Heaven Hill name on it. You don’t want to have the customer spend a lot of money for an ultra-aged whiskey and have it taste like an entry-level whiskey and say ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ ”
The endeavor is not for the faint of heart, says Tim Heuisler, global ambassador for Knob Creek, which debuted its 21-year-old expression ($250 suggested retail) on October 28. He describes its birth in the warehouses of Jim Beam: “I was a little nervous about the 21-year-old age statement, because I thought the 18 was great and I was anxious that the 21 would be overly oaked. But when I tasted it at 20 years, nine months, I was very, very surprised that it didn’t get to this overly leathery kind of flavor. It was more like caramelized oak.”
On the other hand, he admits that the magic doesn’t always work. “Some barrels are just old,” he says. “And just because it’s old it doesn’t mean that it’s great.”
What is considered by some to be the oldest Bourbon ever bottled—James Thompson & Brother Final Reserve 45-Year-Old—would be a cautionary tale, except that it ended successfully. Made at the shuttered Glenmore Distillery, it was released in 2018. While the sale garnered much interest the reviews were mixed. Predictably, some found it too oaky. Nonetheless, the 250 bottles were sold immediately for $1,800 each and now command more than $4,000 on the secondary market.
A characteristic of the super-age market is that it can’t be consistently replicated and so falls into the when-it’s-gone-it’s-gone category. And that may be its charm. Diageo’s Blade And Bow and Orphan Barrel brands source whiskey from forgotten barrels aging in large part at the Stitzel-Weller Distillery, which the spirits giant now owns.
Rather than rely on happy accidents, some in the industry have become more strategic about laying down spirits for the long haul. Lost barrels are a thing of the past in modern warehouses. As a result, those that have reached long years are typically being coaxed along. The first tactic is to monitor the aging process with more frequent sampling as the whiskey gets older to keep it from being overcooked. It is also a disappointing business model to create a fabulously successful brand and then not be able to replicate it.
To avoid running out of sources for very old whiskey in the future, Van Winkle struck a deal with Buffalo Trace in 2002 to begin making and storing whiskey at the distillery that has acquired the Stitzel-Weller brands Weller and Old Fitzgerald. “I finally thought that it would be a good idea to use someone else’s money to put whiskey away for 23 years,” he says. Today, all of Van Winkle’s new releases are made there under his supervision.
Some suggest that wheated Bourbons are more suitable to the task of extra aging, but most agree that location within the warehouse is key. As temperatures can vary widely from story to story in a tall warehouse, it’s important to age on lower floors, which are cooler and allow for longer maturation.
For Michter’s, the solution was to mature whiskey in warehouses of four stories. “We opted not to build our warehouses seven floors high like many barrel warehouses in Kentucky,” says the master of maturation Andrea Wilson, “because the higher floors can become very hot and cause accelerated maturation, which can cause dramatic shifts in liquid quality and flavor profile from the top to the bottom of the house.”
Even while Woodford Reserve has created a whiskey as old as 17—Very Fine Rare Bourbon, which retails for $130— McCall doesn’t stand by long aging as the exclusive path to better Bourbon. That is partially because Woodford uses heated warehouses, which can be cooled and reheated in the winter to produce three extra heat cycles while whiskey typically rests. “The story I want to share is talking about why time in barrel is significant, why it’s important, why we have done Woodford without an age statement, why we would do it with an age statement, why one is not better than the other, but there’s a moment for each of them.”
Most agree that such antiquated gems are not made for everyday drinking, doing shots or combining with other ingredients in complex cocktails where they will be lost.
Widow Jane is a negotiant of whiskeys based in Brooklyn, tapping a number of different distilleries as sources and then treating the liquid with various finishes. Its oldest whiskey is Black Opal, a 20-year-old, which retails for $500. Vice president Michele Clark counsels treating it with contemplation. “It’s a special-occasion drink, not something you are going to mix into a cocktail unless it’s a high-end Old Fashioned. This needs to be opened up over time, you know for 20 minutes, allowing it to sit in a glass and oxygenate and widen.”
Knob Creek’s Heuisler agrees. “At that rarity and that price point it is unfortunate that it isn’t for everybody,” he says. “It’s a double-edged sword: We would love for everybody to be able to enjoy it, but we just don’t have that many 21-year-old barrels.”
