I have, in the past, expressed my fascination with Heaven Hill’s Old Fitzgerald line of premium wheated bourbons, not only for the fact that I still believe they’re packaged in what is the most attractive decanter-style bottle in the entire industry, but because I can’t believe the company designed the series with such a massive focus on variation. Most distillery special releases fluctuate a small amount from year to year or season to season, and are intended for careful dissection by geeks comparing one to the other. Old Fitzgerald, on the other hand, makes those small variations appear utterly inconsequential in comparison.
Consider this: Last spring, in 2021, the biannual Old Fitzgerald release carried an 8-year age statement for Heaven Hill’s classic wheated bourbon recipe.
This year’s spring release for 2022? It’s 17 freaking years old. It’s more than twice as old, folks. This is such a wide, yawning gulf in maturation that those two bottles can barely even be considered to be the same brand at this point. Taken as a whole, then, the Old Fitzgerald series becomes this fascinating sequence of time capsules, like a natural history museum’s exhibit of primitive sea creatures crawling out of the sea to become land dwellers. When you compare them, you’re comparing the dramatic evolution of the same liquid across a disparate array of points.
The other thing that is funny about the series? Some of my favorite entries have been the most radically opposed in terms of age statements. One of the best, in my opinion, was the fall 2019 release, which was 15 years old. But more recently? One of the very best was the aforementioned Spring 2021 release, which was merely 8 years old. There have also been some batches that I didn’t like quite as much, but what has become clear is that the mere age statement is rarely an indicator of which ones will be my favorites. It’s the x-factor of the series—whenever I crack one of these open, I never quite know what I’m going to get.
I will say, I do love what Heaven Hill does with the MSRP of Old Fitzgerald, which generally just increases or decreases in $10 increments per year in the age statement. This strikes me as a more-than-fair way to do things, and runs counter to the expectation that the older age statements would have exponentially higher MSRPs. This way, the 8 year release represents a pretty good value at merely $85, while this 17 year keeps pace in a fair way at $185. Is that expensive? Absolutely, but the sliding scale is still fair. With that said, however, you should feel lucky if you’re able to find this priced at MSRP at a package store, which have increasingly taken it upon themselves to gouge the consumer in a bid to jealously reap their share of bourbon secondary market pricing. I can only imagine that this age statement, the oldest yet for the main Old Fitzgerald series, will inspire more intense secondary market pricing than ever before for Old Fitz.