Old Fourth Distillery Bottled in Bond Bourbon

Truly, of all the qualities one must need to possess in order to open a microdistillery in the U.S., “patience” has to be chief among them.

Unlike in the world of beer, it’s literally impossible for certain kinds of world-class spirits to be produced in the first months a new distillery is in business. Or within its first year. Or within its first several years. Compare that to the beer world, wherein a just-opened brewery can theoretically be making IPA just as tasty and just as fresh as the Tree Houses or Trilliums of the world. No, it’s not likely that the just-opened brewpub down the street is outdoing some of the best breweries in the world at their own game, but it is at least possible. With a just-opened distillery, on the other hand, you can say with certainty that they won’t be immediately selling any well-aged whiskey … unless, of course, the business in question simply bought someone else’s aged product.

Atlanta’s Old Fourth Distillery is an odd, special case, when it comes to whiskey. Their newly released, single barrel Bottled in Bond (BiB) Bourbon has been an immediate critical hit, winning a double gold medal at the 2019 World Spirits Competition in San Francisco. That this whiskey is sourced from MGP of Indiana isn’t terribly surprising—many young distilleries get their bourbon and rye from the massive factory that is MGP. What’s weird is that Old Fourth Ward first purchased this whiskey from MGP four years ago and then took it upon themselves to age the spirit in their own bonded rickhouse. It begs the question: Who deserves more of the plaudits for how well this bourbon turned out? The guys in Indiana who distilled it, or the guys in Atlanta who aged it for four years and guided it into the attractive bottle in which it now resides? It’s something that I’ve never really heard of a distillery doing: Contracting white whiskey (due to a lack of distilling capacity), and then taking over the aging process on their own.

Regardless, this bourbon is on store shelves now, and I have to commend Old Fourth Distillery for that all-important patience. There was absolutely nothing preventing these guys from taking their MGP white dog and releasing it as soon as it hit two (or even one) years old. At two years, they could have labeled it as “straight” bourbon. But instead, they plowed on ahead, waiting the full four years (and full 100 proof) necessary to label the product as Bottled in Bond. And the wait has produced something that is genuinely quite tasty indeed. I can’t help but wonder if the balmy Georgia climate played its own part in accelerating the process of the liquid’s aging, just a bit.

On the nose, O4W BiB is redolent of sweet spice, dark caramel, vanilla bean and barrel char. If that sounds to you like a lot of bourbon descriptions, that’s because it is—this offering is quintessentially bourbon-y. It’s a classic expression of 100-proof, bottled-in-bond bourbon, with a level of alcohol heat that is nicely suppressed on the nose. As it sits in the glass, it unfolds with a deep profile of sweet spice (ginger, cinnamon, clove), brown sugar and raspberry fruitiness. It’s a lovely nose, and an unmistakably bourbon one.