Heaven Hill grasp distiller Conor O’Driscoll reverently refers to Previous Fitzgerald as a “grand previous model.” He’s proper, in fact—the whiskey dates again to the 1870s, when, because the story goes, Previous Choose Distillery employee John E. Fitzgerald had a whiskey named after him and went on to promote it to steamship traces and personal golf equipment all through the South. The identify “Previous Fitzgerald” was trademarked in 1884, and the whiskey hit the broader market by 1889. Within the century-plus that adopted, the model modified possession a number of occasions, surviving Prohibition and coming below the possession of Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle at Stitzel-Weller Distillery. Van Winkle was instrumental in modernizing Previous Fitzgerald, adjusting the whiskey’s recipe to incorporate wheat within the mashbill and reworking its look by bottling it in heavy glass decanters.
Stitzel-Weller was bought to a forerunner firm of Diageo in 1972, and Previous Fitzgerald stayed there till it was acquired by its present proprietor, Heaven Hill, in 1999 as a part of a Diageo deal to promote Bernheim Distillery in Louisville. However the model continued to toil away exterior the limelight. In 2014, amid an industry-wide scarcity of bourbon shares, Heaven Hill discontinued the Previous Fitzgerald 1849 label to give attention to different whiskeys, however in 2018, Previous Fitzgerald returned as a bi-annual launch, the Previous Fitzgerald Bottled in Bond Collection, showing in spring and fall.
As restricted releases that typically soar as excessive as 19 years previous, the Bottled in Bond Collection whiskeys are sometimes laborious to search out; now, Heaven Hill is introducing an Previous Fitzgerald 7 12 months previous to broaden the distribution of its well-loved label. This new addition to the Previous Fitz portfolio is priced at simply $60 a bottle (in comparison with $130 for the most recent spring launch of the Bottled in Bond sequence, which is made with 9 12 months previous whiskey). It too is bottled in bond and maintains the Previous Fitzgerald wheated profile, with a mashbill of 68% corn, 20% wheat, and 12% malted barley. It’s thus comparable in primary profile to its sibling releases. The palate is wealthy and viscous, and it carries an amazing quantity of spice, in addition to candy citrus, honey, and berry fruit. “We speak about wheat whiskeys and wheated bourbons as having yeasty, bready notes, however to me, this one comes throughout as extra graham cracker-y, and it has a richness that lasts,” notes O’Driscoll.
With inventories now increase throughout the whiskey panorama amid a softening in general gross sales over the previous couple of years, Heaven Hill, like most whiskey firms these days, is on the lookout for methods to get stock to market. The massive winner right here is the whiskey lover, who now has far higher entry to older whiskeys than has been seen in a few years. This new 7 12 months previous is the most recent instance. O’Driscoll stresses that this can be a whiskey that shall be round for the lengthy haul. “We’ve bought 2.1 million barrels getting old throughout our warehouses, and about 20% of these are Previous Fitzgerald’s wheated bourbon,” he notes.
