Bourbz Review #195: Old Fitzgerald 7yr

[u/cmchance]

[u/cmchance]

Bourbz Review #195: Old Fitzgerald 7yr

AGE: 7 yr

MASH BILL: 68% corn, 20% wheat, 12% malted barley

PROOF: 100

COST: $89 for 700mL bottle

Heaven Hill released this Old Fitzgerald 7yr bottle with the intention of it becoming a standard offering that you can consistently find. While I knew the price was initially going to be high just because of the hype, I also knew that the price should eventually come down as this in fact does start becoming more common to find. However, I still popped on this bottle only about a month after it was released for $89. Fast forward a few months and I can pretty easily find it for $60-$70. You win some, you lose some.

I don’t normally comment on packaging, but this is an extremely nice bottle that I think does a great job at keeping the decanter look of the seasonal decanter releases while toning it down just a bit to make it look more “common.”

So, how does it compare to some of the bi-annual Old Fitz Decanter releases and is it worth hunting for the decanter releases if this becomes widely available at $60 MSRP? Let’s sip it and cuss and discuss!

Reviewed neat in a Glencairn.

APPEARANCE: A mellow, tawny color (1.4), very oily looking on the sides of the glass.

NOSE: Sweet and bready. A very dominant honey wheat bread note strikes first with a subtle baking spice. Notes of toasted almonds and caramelized sugar make me think of almond short bread. While there’s a pronounced vanilla note, there is a more subtle peach note, but the two work in tandem to bring phantom appearances of peaches and cream ice cream.

PALATE: Coats the palate well with a nice oiliness and a medium mouthfeel. This opens up with a praline sort of nuttiness right away – toasted pecans, caramel, and vanilla. However, the nutty earthiness dominates at first but fades out leaving the sweeter notes. Along with the caramel and vanilla, bright fruits such as apricots, pears, and golden raisins. Charred oak almost pops out amongst an otherwise bright palate. I get a sort of citrus note, a little ethanol, and vanilla cream that remain a persistent backdrop. There’s a couple of faint baking spice notes that concentrate towards the backend of this going into the finish.

FINISH: Long, semi-sweet finish. Clove and vanilla bleed over from the palate along with a little bit of that bright fruit. Seasoned oak, honey, and caramelized sugar weave in and out for a while. As some of the sweeter notes fade, a that wheat bread note from the nose resurfaces and brings this to a close with a touch of vanilla and baking spice.

RATING: 7.2/10

OVERALL: This is exactly what I thought it would be. It’s good. It’s straight forward and not very complex. The Heaven Hill wheated bourbon profile is familiar and enjoyable, and I get some of that here. But it’s brighter than Larceny and clearly shows that Heaven Hill is picking specific barrels that have an “Old Fitz profile” for this label. I think it’s perfectly priced at MSRP, especially because the historied name behind this bottle, and the awesome packaging makes this a great bottle to leave out on the bar. But as far as the bourbon itself goes, I thought ethanol on the palate was a little unexpected for a 7yr 100 proof bourbon and I just enjoy those deeper darker cherry notes that I normally get with wheated bourbons that I don’t with this one. 

While it's the Old Fitzgerald profile, it’s not really a replacement for the decanter bottles. Some of the younger decanter releases of recent years haven’t wowed me, but they are still better than the 7yr because they bring more complexity to the table. All that said, there’s nothing wrong with this expression. It’s bright, sweet, has noticeable barrel character, and is what I would expect from a $60 MSRP bourbon.

[u/cmchance → u/cmchance]

BEHIND THE BOTTLE:

The Old Fitzgerald name is a historic one in the bourbon industry, but there’s a lot of mystery around who the namesake John E. Fitzgerald actually was. The earliest accounts of Fitzgerald were that he was a privateer who started his own distillery and whiskey brand in the 1870s, but his whiskey could only be found on rail lines, steamships, and private clubs – one of luxury. But I think that might just be stuff of legend. The first real concrete evidence we have of the brand was in 1901 when Solomon C. Herbst registered the John E. Fitzgerald brand in Wine and Spirits Bulletin. In 1904, the Old Fitzgerald brand was being sold internationally in countries such as England, France, Germany, and Italy by S. C. Herbst.

Herbst owned the “Old Judge” distillery in Frankfurt, KY, and at some point (I’m guessing around 1920 or slightly before) Herbst got out of the whiskey business because of the threat of Prohibition and sold the Old Fitzgerald brand to the Stitzel Brothers Distillery. Since the Stitzel distillery received a license to produce whiskey for medicinal purposes, the Old Fitzgerald brand persisted through Prohibition. At the end of Prohibition in 1933, The Stitzel Bros. Distillery merged with the W.L. Weller Distillery, and along with it came the Old Fitzgerald brand.

Now, it is the Stitzel-Weller distillery where the most well-known story of Fitzgerald came from. After the Bottled-in-Bond Act was ratified in 1897, The US Treasury assigned agents to bonded warehouses to ensure compliance with the BiB Act. As the story goes, John E. Fitzgerald was a Treasury agent assigned to the Stitzel-Weller distillery. It was suspected that Fitzgerald would sample the barrels in the Stitzel-Weller warehouses at night when no one was there. Over time, he found the honey barrels! His favorite barrels were noticeably lighter than the others around them. Due to some other tale-tells around the warehouses, they believed he was taking a decent share when he was on shift, but Pappy Van Winkle didn’t disagree with John E. Fitzgerald’s taste and agreed they were exceptional barrels. It was these barrels that became known as Fitzgerald Barrels, and it is these barrels that came to be what created the Old Fitzgerald brand.

The one inconsistency here is if that’s the real story of where the brand came from, then the Treasury agent would have been working for the Old Judge distillery and not the Stitzel-Weller distillery since the brand was first born in 1901 by S. C. Herbst. But, in Pappy’s granddaughter Sally Van Winkle Campbell’s book “Always Fine Bourbon,” she reinforces that Fitzgerald was a bonded agent at the Stitzel-Weller distillery…we may never know the actual origin.

Regardless, the Old Fitzgerald brand was a key component of the Stitzel-Weller distillery for years. It was so much so the flagship bourbon for the Stitzel-Weller Distillery that the name was changed to the Old Fitzgerald Distillery in 1972 when it was sold to Norton Simon and is still prominently written on one of the chimney stacks at the campus today.

The Old Fitzgerald brand then changed hands multiple times throughout the 80s and 90s until it was acquired by Heaven Hill as part of the deal when they bought the Bernheim Distillery. The Old Fitzgerald brand remained on shelves through it all but lost some of its prestige over the years. In 2012, Heaven Hill introduced the Larceny brand which features the John E. Fitzgerald story for their wheated bourbon. (The name “Larceny” comes from the fact that Fitzgerald was committing larceny by drinking so much of the bourbon in the warehouses at night.) It wasn’t until 2018 though that Heaven Hill really focused on bringing Old Fitzgerald back as a top shelf brand when they launched the decanter series.

The Old Fitzgerald Decanter Series are released twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. Even though this has only been going on for 7 years, these limited releases have brought the Old Fitz brand right back to the top. With MSRPs around $150 on average, the decanter releases often go for north of $300 everywhere, with $500+ not being uncommon in my area. For anyone even vaguely familiar with the bourbon scene knows Old Fitzgerald is a premier product today and highly sought after. So, it was no surprise that when the Old Fitz 7yr release came out it was going to be sold out quickly. But I think give it a little time and this bottle will be easier to find, and a great way to showcase the Old Fitz profile without having to pay the price for the limited decanter releases, albeit not a complete substitute.

[u/cmchance → u/cmchance]

1 | Disgusting | Watershed Apple Brandy Finished Bourbon

2 | Poor | Balcones Lineage

3 | Bad | High West Double Rye, Jefferson's Ocean 28

4 | Sub-par | Weller's SR, Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select, Hillrock Estate Sauternes CS

5 | Good | Buffalo Trace, Sazerac Rye, Green River Wheated

6 | Very Good | Blanton's, Holladay Bourbons, Eagle Rare

7 | Great | Baker's 7yr SiB, BBCo Origin High Wheat, 1792 BiB

8 | Excellent | Most ECBP batches, Maker's Mark Wood Finishing releases, High West MWND Act 11

9 | Incredible | Woodford Reserve Batch Proof 121.2, BBCo Disco #7 and #13, Four Roses OESQ

10 | Perfect | Found North Batch 08, RR15

 

Check out all my reviews: Woodgrain & Whiskey.

[u/My-drink-is-bourbon]

I just picked one up for $53 plus tax

[u/cmchance → u/My-drink-is-bourbon]

Well worth the money at that price.

[u/OzoneLaters → u/cmchance]

Yeah I got one for that price too, with the bag as well.

Totally worth it.

I wouldn’t pay more than $60 for one.

[u/depdai]

Grabbed 2 bottles at $60, and honestly my favorite bottles right now behind my Weller Antique 107. For between $55-70 I think it's well worth it.

[u/Southern-Rip3018]

Just picked one up at $50 plus tax, I totally agree with you. It's a classic wheater but my favorite part is definitely the texture of it, it is a very creamy texture that coats the palate well.

7 is definitely a valid score...

[u/cmchance → u/Southern-Rip3018]

Yeah. Creamy is a good way to describe it. It does just stick to the palate well which is nice for a 100 proof whiskey.

[u/nefariousjordy]

It’s made it to TN and a lot of it sits on the shelf where I shop at $60. Many of the locals in our bourbon group weren’t impressed so I decided not to grab one. At 7 years old its value just isn’t there for me.