Old Fitzgerald in a Bourbon Heritage Collection box

[MikeK]

OK, todays question is, can one tell if a bottle of "Very Special Old Fitzgerald 12yo" is old enough to have some nice S-W whiskey, or if it is the newer HH product? I have had the newer HH release and found it fine, but not great.

Yesterday I found a couple bottles of VSOF-12, in the Heritage Collection box, if that means anything. The label says Louisville, but that doesn't really help in this case I don't think. The bottom of the bottle says "Made in Canada", which I thought was unusual. The bottle has a short screw cap.

I've had one drink from the bottle. Based on that alone I think it is HH.

Anyone know for sure? Mike?

Thanks,
Mike

[cowdery]

When the BHC "Very Special Old Fitzgerald" first came out, when it definitely was SW whiskey, I thought it was just okay, certainly not comparable to the legendary Very Very Old.

No one is more guilty than me of touting the merits of SW whiskey, but in fact not every barrel was a gem and not every product released using that stock was a winner. The Van Winkle whiskeys are as good as they are only in part because they are SW. A big part of the credit goes to Julian for picking some of the best barrels.

[bourbonv]

Let me second what Chuck just said. I agree that not every barrel of Stitzel-Weller bourbon was outstanding and Julian is a master at picking the great barrels. For me the proof of this is the difference between Pappy 20 and Weller 19. Weller 19 is not near as good as the Pappy 20 and that is because Julian cherry picked the barrels for his 20 year old whiskey.

I will say that Stitzel-Weller did make a consistantly decent whiskey. It is very rare that you found a bad barrel in the distillery's warehouses. This does tend to make for better whiskey as a whole when bottled.

As far as MikeK's question, I am not sure what to look for since it has been a while since I bought a bottle of the Very Special Old Fitzgerald. I always prefered the Weller Centennial myself. I would look for the Heritage collection neck seal. I would look for Louisville or maybe even Shively as the distillery location and Owensboro as the bottling location. The bottle style used was a Canadian whiskey bottle so the bottle may say "made in Canada".

Mike Veach