Since its debut at the beginning of 2020, I have often gone back and forth on my impression of Heaven Hill’s Larceny Barrel Proof Bourbon series. When the series first began, the first few batches didn’t really grab my imagination—although I loved the idea of a cask strength wheated bourbon from Heaven Hill, offering some of the same high value in the segment as the celebrated Elijah Craig Barrel Proof, the early batches struck me as too youthful or astringent to hold up to their own advanced proof point. After this time, I didn’t taste as many of the following batches, although occasional check ins with the series such as the A121 bottling did seem to indicate that it was undergoing subjective improvement. It wasn’t until the 2022 batches, however, that I first began tasting some batches of Larceny Barrel Proof that I really loved—not whiskeys I ended up having a chance to review, but in particular the B522 and C922 batches of Larceny Barrel Proof struck me as quite impressive.
It’s been enough at least to recapture my interest in the series before this, the most recent batch, A123. Like all batches of Larceny Barrel Proof, this is from Heaven Hill’s wheated bourbon mash bill, aged roughly 6-8 years. It’s bottled at a pretty stout 125.8 proof, which is actually the second highest in the history of the series, trailing only the 126.6 proof expression from C922. It carries an MSRP of $70—a little higher than when the brand was first announced, but that’s par for the course for the bourbon world during the last couple years of inflation. That MSRP still makes it a pretty solid value on paper, as cask strength wheated bourbons are never particularly easy to come by at an affordable price point.
So with all that said, let’s dive into this one and see how the series has continued to evolve.