There’s a particular whiskey geek right of passage wherein you realize that not only do you have a lot of whiskey in your home, but you have multiple bottles of the same brand—enough to taste batch-vs-batch side by side. With some brands, those batch-to-batch differences are small enough to be rendered insignificant, but with others, they’re barside arguments waiting to happen. And few brands afford such an easy source of batch-vs-batch comparisons as Elijah Craig Barrel Proof.
Let it be known: I love ECBP. Hell, I’ve written whole paeans of praise toward that particular brand before. I love it for a lot of reasons, many of them sensory (it’s delicious), but in particular because it’s also so relatively accessible. Finding batches of each ECBP isn’t all that difficult, and the three-per-year release schedule means that every calendar year invites comparison between the “A,” “B” and “C” batches. But it’s also one of the safest pure picks in terms of value for your dollar, at roughly $65-75 at most bottle shops, because no ECBP batch is ever “bad”—in my experience they’re all just varying shades of good, ranging from merely “pretty damn good” to “mother of god.” Barrel-proof bourbon is never going to be truly “cheap,” but at $65 for a 12-year, age-stated, reliably excellent, 130 proof-plus expression, it’s easy to justify that particular splurge. Or certainly, far easier than rolling the dice on most newer barrel-proof brands.
Which brings us to ECBP A120, Heaven Hill’s first batch of 2020. If you’re unfamiliar with the batch name system, it’s actually more simple than it looks—the “A” designates this as the first release of the year, while the “1” means it was technically “released” in January, even though it’s just hitting store shelves now. The remaining digits, “20,” are simply this year. Therefore, the next release will be “B_20,” etc, depending on what month it’s released. Strength, meanwhile, can vary quite a bit, from as low as last year’s B519 (122.2 proof) to the high point of 140.2 proof, which was set way back in 2014. The last two batches, however, have been closer to the top of the range, at 136.8 and 136.6 for A120.
Now that we’ve explained the technicals, let’s get to tasting, yeah? I happen to have some of the previous C919 batch as well, so I’ll also include how the two seem to compare to each other.