Kentucky distillery Heaven Hill is best known for its affordable and widely available bourbons, Evan Williams and Elijah Craig. But the distillery also has a few unicorn bottles in its arsenal, as does pretty much every major whiskey distillery in the state these days. One of those is Old Fitzgerald, and the news about the new spring 2025 edition was just announced.
The history of Old Fitzgerald dates back to the late 1800s, when John Fitzgerald opened a distillery in Kentucky and started producing bourbon under that name, first releasing it in 1889. The brand eventually moved to the historic Stitzel-Weller distillery, where Pappy Van Winkle turned it into a wheated bourbon, and continued to be released in various iterations including decanter bottles in the 1950s and Old Fitzgerald Prime in the ’60s. In 1984, it was acquired by Distillers Limited Co. of Scotland, which soon became United Distillers after merging with Guinness, and then Diageo in 1997. In 1999, Heaven Hill purchased Old Fitzgerald from Diageo as part of the Bernheim Distillery, and in 2018 the first edition of the Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond series was released.
Today, Old Fitzgerald continues to be released twice a year, in the fall and the spring. The Spring 2025 edition, the 15th release, falls on the younger end of the spectrum—a nine-year-old bourbon that was distilled in the spring of 2016 and bottled this spring. It’s bottled-in-bond like all the whiskeys in this collection, meaning it’s exactly 100 proof, at least four years old, and the product of one distillery and one distillation season. We did not get to sample this new bourbon yet, but the official tasting notes describe apple pie on the nose, followed by notes of vanilla, butterscotch, toasted cereal, and baking spice, culminating in a finish of baked apples, oak, and cinnamon.
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The other whiskey of note from Heaven Hill is the new Grain to Glass Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. This whiskey was first released last year, and we reviewed it favorably at the time. It’s made from a mashbill of specific grain varietals sourced from Beck’s Hybrids and grown at Peterson Farms in Nelson County, Kentucky. The mashbill for this new bourbon is 52 percent corn (Beck’s 6225 varietal), 35 percent rye, and 13 percent malted barley, which has more rye than the typical Heaven Hill bourbon. it was aged for six years at the Cox’s Creek rickhouse and bottled non-chill filtered at barrel strength of 105 proof. As part of this release, Heaven Hill created the Family Farms First initiative and partnered with Farm Rescue, a nonprofit dedicated to helping farmers through hardship and natural disasters.
Old Fitzgerald Bottled-in-Bond can be a hard bottle to get your hands on, especially at its suggested retail price of $130 (not gonna happen). But you can find previous editions, and soon the current one, available at websites like ReserveBar, and different versions of the Grain to Glass whiskey at Flaviar now.
Authors
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Jonah Flicker