It’s an odd feeling when you come to realize that a certain distillery’s specific mash bill seems to read differently to your taste buds than it does to most other people. For me, that’s the wheated bourbon mash bill at Heaven Hill—the combination of 68% corn, 20% wheat and 12% malted barley that makes up everything under the Larceny and Old Fitzgerald brand names. It’s just one of those cases where other people seem to taste them one way, and I taste them another.
This isn’t to say that I dislike this specific mash bill, or the brands made with it. There have been several Old Fitzgerald batches, including this year’s Spring 2021 edition, that I thought were absolutely delicious. The Larceny Barrel Proof series … well, I still haven’t been able to make up my mind on that one, but I’m hardly along there. But the thing that stands out in my mind is how different my descriptive language tends to be in terms of what I’m tasting from others who taste the same bourbons.
Other tasters, in my experience, tend to read bourbons from this particular mash bill as more decadent and desserty, awash in caramelized sugars, vanilla, fruity notes and flavors more clearly derived from wheat. To my palate, however, they often read as unexpectedly spicy, with a combination of baking spices/spicy oak that you don’t really expect, particularly in a bourbon where the stereotypically spicier rye content has been subbed out for wheat. I must note that not all wheated bourbons stand out in this way to me, but the Heaven Hill ones tend to. Granted, no one note is universal across every single release, and the rye-containing, classic Heaven Hill bourbon mashbill is evidence enough of this. But I do sometimes wonder if there’s something specific about this one that makes me an atypical taster of Larceny and Old Fitzgerald in particular.
I found myself wondering about all of these things once again while sampling this newest Old Fitzgerald release, which is the bottle for Fall 2021. This release is a bit older than the spring’s 8-year-old bourbon, having been distilled in the spring of 2010 and ultimately aged 11 years in Heaven Hill Rickhouse EE. Like all other entries in this series, it’s bottled at 50% ABV (100 proof), with a sliding MSRP pegged to the age statement that puts this one at $110. Old Fitz releases in recent years have ranged from as young as 8 to as old as 16 years, offering a great degree of variation, and I haven’t yet found a specific age range that stands out as “better” than the other. In fact, my two favorite offerings were almost diametrically opposed, with one being 8 years old and the other being 15. So it’s safe to say these must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.