The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
BETTER WITH AGE
The search for the oldest bottles of bourbon in Kentucky
$1,500 can buy you a taste of Kentucky’s rich bourbon history.
That’s the price tag for a one-ounce pour of one of the oldest whiskeys in the commonwealth.
Candidly, this bottle of Cedar Brook from 1892 is palatable, but is not the tastiest, or even most sought-after, spirit in the vintage bourbon library at Bardstown Bourbon Company, Dan Callaway, the vice president of product development, told me. The bourbon’s unusual light color suggests that it was aged in a used barrel, which would have been allowed during that period before the Federal Alcohol Administration Act passed in 1938. The brand won the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
Callaway loves the story behind this vintage bottle, but in terms of enjoying it, the library has much younger “dusties,” as they’re called, that have held on to their flavor.
In the weeks ahead of Bourbon Heritage Month, I set out to find some of the oldest bottles of bourbon in Kentucky. I reached out to more than a dozen distilleries, museums, collectors, and bars to see just how much of Kentucky’s 240-year bourbon history has lived on in the spirit itself. While this 132-year-old whiskey is not necessarily the most antique one I tracked down, it is the oldest one I found that’s available for tasting. Most of the oldest bottles are considered artifacts, not menu items.
I also learned that the concept of “the oldest bottle of bourbon” is a lot more nuanced than I thought.
The oldest known bottle of bourbon in the world was auctioned off in 2021, according to a report from The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. Raised lettering on the bottle says it’s “Evans & Ragland Old Ingledew Whiskey.” The article states experts used a “hypodermic needle to extract 2 milliliters of whiskey from the bottle, which was then sent for carbon-14 dating at the University of Georgia and the University of Glasgow in Scotland.”
The results suggest the whiskey was produced between 1763 and 1803.
It doesn’t have a true label as we think of them today, but rather, there’s a small, typed note stuck to the bottle that reads “This bourbon was probably made before 1865 and was in the cellars of Mr. John Pierpont Morgan, from whose estate it was acquired upon his death. As far as it was known, there were no bourbon distilleries in Georgia after the Civil War.”
Even with that murky and suggested history, the bottle smashed its projected $20,000$40,000 estimate to earn at auction and brought in $137,000.
And that’s not even Kentucky bourbon — it’s from Georgia.
The first chapter of Kentucky’s bourbon heritage begins with Evan Williams opening a commercial distillery on the Ohio River in 1783. The commonwealth’s first bourbons, however, have not survived quite as long as his name and story.
Some of the 400 or so bottles in the vintage library at Bardstown Bourbon Company come
from collectors, auctions, estates, and sometimes even the basements at private homes. Pours range from $30 to $3,000 per ounce, depending on which part of Kentucky’s delicious bourbon heritage you’re hoping to sample.
“You know that one of the saddest things is if you’re going to an auction, and it’s an estate sale of someone that’s passed away, and they never got to enjoy,” Callaway told me.
But even if the liquid has lived on from one century to the next, that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to drink it, said Nick Laracuente, the archivist for Buffalo Trace Distillery and its parent company Sazerac Company.
He’s always a little hesitant to try the very old dusties and usually waits for someone else to take the first sip. Once he tasted one from the 1950s that had been stored in an attic for decades. It looked perfectly fine, he told me, but it tasted as though someone sprayed perfume in his mouth.
His team recently opened a spirit bottled between 1906 and 1910 with liquid made by Weller and Sons Distillery and bottled by GB Willow as “Willow’s Special” in Paducah. It had a lovely color and a succulent nose that suggested it was 10 or 12 years old. They hoped to recreate it from the tasting notes. Then they didn’t want to.
The tasting notes were wretched: pine needles and cough drops.
Not all dusties are all duds, though. One of the most delicious whiskeys he ever tasted was an Old Rittenhouse Rye from 1905 that someone he knew won at an auction.
“It was incredible,” Laracuente remembered.
The oldest bottle of bourbon in the Buffalo Trace archive is an 1890 Old Carter from the Wright and Taylor Distillery in Louisville. The back story on that one hasn’t been verified, but it’s thought that perhaps the celebrated 19th-century distiller Col. E.H. Taylor purchased it at some point because he was afraid of trademark infringement.
They haven’t opened that one yet, and after the experience with Willow’s Special, Laracuente is perfectly fine with that.
“I’ve got to give it a second before we go on and sample another old bottle, just in case,” he told me. “I’ve got to get rid of some bad luck, here.”
And really, outside of our Kentucky’s tasting libraries and their tried-andtrue vintage picks that seems to be the mentality with most of the dusties.
The Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History, certainly, isn’t offering samples of its oldest bourbon, and for good reason, too.
“It’s dark, very, very dark, it’s probably extremely tannic, and it’s probably very undrinkable,” Jack Rein, the executive director of the museum told me.
Of all the places I reached out to for this column, the bottle there is likely the oldest one.
And really, he can’t say much more about it beyond that.
It has a handwritten label that’s difficult to make out. The bottle and seal suggest this was likely a Civil War-era bourbon that was filled from a cask at a tavern.
None of that is confirmed. Because really, these bottles were never meant to be artifacts. They were meant to be enjoyed.
And really, that’s the whole mentality behind the vintage tasting library at
Bardstown Bourbon Company.
Callaway says he always feels a pang when one of the bottles in his collection is nearing the end.
When that 1892 Cedar Brook finally runs out, it won’t be the oldest drinkable bourbon that’s left. Something else will be.
“We always say they taste better when they’re open,” Callaway said.
writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. Sometimes she writes about bourbon, too. If you’ve got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com. Follow along on Instagram @MaggieMenderski.