Spirit Review: Very Special Old Fitzgerald Bourbon

• Size: 750mL bottle
• Paid about $40 at the Heritage Hills Bourbon Heritage Center

Background

On my recent trip to Kentucky to pick up my Maker’s Mark Ambassador bottles, we also swung by Bardstown and stopped in at the Heaven Hill Bourbon Heritage Center. For those not familiar with the Heaven Hill brand, they are producers of the very popular Evan Williams and Elijah Craig brands, as well as less well-known whiskeys like Rittenhouse, Henry McKenna and Fighting Cock. I was set to pick up another bottle of Elijah Craig, which is one of my favorite bourbons, but then realized I could get that pretty much anywhere and I already knew that I liked it…so I should get something I hadn’t often seen and maybe never tried. So I ended up with a bottle of Very Special Old Fitzgerald, a 12-year aged bourbon bottled at 90 proof.

The rest of the factual data on the label reads as such: “Hand Made Sour Mash” (as is the case with most bourbon), “Aged in Wood” (by federal law, bourbon has to be aged a minimum of 2 years in first-use charred oak barrels), “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey” (by state law, this declaration means it was made in Kentucky and uses no coloring and flavor additives).

A Wikipedia entry distills the essence of the brand’s history thusly:

Beginning in 1870, Old Fitzgerald was first produced for rail and steamship lines and private clubs primarily located in the south by John E. Fitzgerald in Frankfort, Kentucky. Around 1900, “Old Fitz” was released to the American public and in Europe as well. It was one of the few distilled using the pot still method, and continued to do so until around 1913. During Prohibition, Old Fitzgerald was one of a select few to distill under government supervision for the national medicinal trade, it was soon after acquired by Pappy Van Winkle for $10,000 who then introduced the “Whisper of Wheat” to the original recipe. By substituting wheat for the more traditional rye in the grain recipe, Old Fitzgerald is finished with a rounder, softer profile compared to other bourbons. It was produced by the Stitzel-Weller Distillery until, after some changes of ownership, the brand was sold around 1992 by Diageo to Heaven Hill, which currently produces and markets it.

Heaven Hill’s marketing materials add that:

Very Special Old Fitz is a critically acclaimed super-premium Small Batch Bourbon. In their authoritative work The Book of Bourbon, Gary and Mardee Regan state that “the balance in this bottling is as perfect as any we tasted” and award it their highest recommendation. 

That’s probably enough information about the Very Special Old Fitzgerald. If you find it near you, you can expect to pay anywhere from $35 to $45 a bottle…at least that’s what I’m seeing on other sites that reviewed or referenced it.

Tasting Notes

It’s become my regular practice to crack open a new bottle of whiskey and have several small “testers” over a couple weeks before writing up a review. It’s amazing how the introduction of a little air over a few weeks (or even a few days) can dramatically change the flavor of a whiskey. Decanting a distilled beverage would basically do the same thing.

The color of the VS Old Fitz in my whiskey snifter was a pale amber…paler than I would expect for a 12-year bourbon. Swirling it around in the glass showed off it’s extra-slow-moving legs, speaking to an especially thick and viscous dram.

Bringing the glass close to my nose, I picked up on a strong vanilla note right away. It wasn’t until I got my nose right to (and into) the glass that I got more oak and caramel, then a bit of the corn and grain goodness (and some attendant alcohol vapors that are natural when you stick your face into a glass of whiskey).

A very small sip gave me vanilla and char on the lips before it melted away with a bit of spicy. The spice stayed mostly toward the front of the palate, where most of the sweet flavor was picked up as well, and I found the VSOF to have a clean, smooth finish, perhaps due to the wheat in the mash bill.

Overall, the whiskey by itself is eminently drinkable…straight out of the bottle, no ice, no water. It’s definitely “round” and accessible and not too strong.

I paired the Old Fitz with an Avo Maduro, a medium-bodied Dominican-based blend with a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper. Both whiskey and cigar were well-balanced and went together extremely well. Both were sweet, but not cloying, with a bit of spice as an accent.