Only one month after bringing Stitzel Reserve to cabinets, Diageo-owned Stitzel-Weller Distillery is unveiling one other ultra-aged bourbon, this one underneath the I.W. Harper label. At 34 years previous, the brand new whiskey is billed because the rarest, oldest launch in I.W. Harper’s 150-year historical past.
I.W. Harper dates again to the 1870s, when German-Jewish immigrant brothers Isaac Wolfe (I.W.) and Bernard Bernheim opened a buying and selling firm, Bernheim Brothers, in Paducah, Kentucky and inside it, launched bourbon model I.W. Harper (the brothers believed their final identify was each too German and too Jewish for an American whiskey model, and so used the identify of a preferred thoroughbred breeder and coach, John Harper).
Inside a couple of years of its debut, the bourbon had gained followers throughout the nation, and by 1888, the brothers had sufficient capital to buy the Pleasure Ridge Park Distillery in Louisville, which they renamed Bernheim Distillery. Manufacturing of I.W. Harper continued all through Prohibition—Bernheim was one of some distilleries licensed to promote “medicinal whiskey”. Just some years after Prohibition was repealed, each Bernheims had departed the model, and it was bought to Schenley Distillers in 1937. Schenley retained possession of I.W. Harper till 1987, when the corporate was acquired by United Distillers (Guinness), which might change into a part of Diageo 10 years later.
Beneath United Distillers’ stewardship, I.W. Harper shifted out of the U.S., leaving American cabinets in favor of Asian markets, the place it had spectacular outcomes, turning into the highest bourbon in Japan within the late Nineteen Eighties. Print promoting in Japan on the time confirmed a top-hatted gentleman out in town in New York Metropolis because the model grew to become related to American glamour, although actually it was nearly unknown in New York on the time.
After a 20-year hiatus, Diageo introduced I.W. Harper stateside once more in 2015 with the debut of a 15 yr previous. Since then, a straight bourbon and a 4 yr previous bourbon completed in cabernet sauvignon casks are the one different whiskeys which have joined the model’s lineup…till now, that’s.
The brand new I.W. Harper 34 yr previous bourbon is a mix of simply 4 barrels, and it is bottled at a cask power of 63.1% ABV. The entire barrels have been aged at Stitzel-Weller for the whole lot of their maturation. The story of their distillation is just a little fuzzier—whereas Diageo is aware of these barrels have been distilled in Kentucky in 1989, the corporate can not verify that Stitzel-Weller was the producer. That stated, in accordance with Diageo’s director of American whiskey liquid growth Nicole Austin, the 4 barrels pulled for this launch have been earmarked for I.W. Harper from the leap.
Simply 11 bottles of whiskey got here from the 4 barrels, and of these, solely 5 can be found on the market, so don’t plan on discovering one within the wild. They’re up for international public sale at Sotheby’s in New York. If you happen to’re eager about getting your arms on a bottle, you possibly can enter a bid now by way of Thursday, August seventh, at sothebys.com; the public sale home estimates that every of the 5 bottles will go for $3,000-$5,000.
All proceeds of I.W. Harper 34 yr previous will go to Native Son, a company that helps black homosexual and/or queer males. It was handpicked because the recipient of public sale gross sales by the whiskey’s collaborative associate, the award-winning actor, director, and philanthropist Colman Domingo.
