Whiskey with a Story to Tell

Heaven Hill has a special, one-time release of some particularly rare bourbon this autumn, a bourbon that underscores how being the world’s second-largest bourbon producer isn’t as secure a position as it might seem. That whiskey, Heaven Hill 27-Year-Old Barrel Proof Small Batch Straight Kentucky Whiskey, is a legacy of the company’s old Bardstown distillery, which was devastated in a 1996 fire that has gone down as one of the whiskey industry’s worst disasters.

“The 1996 fire resulted in the loss of the Old Heavenhill Springs distillery, 7 warehouses, and 90,000 barrels, or 2 percent of the world’s whiskey,” said Heaven Hill President Max Shapira. “More importantly, there were no lives lost, no jobs lost.”

By happenstance, if a whiskey company was to suffer a major fire, 1996 might have been the ideal time, as the industry was only just beginning to emerge from its market collapse in the 1970s and 1980s. Heaven Hill’s friends-cum-rivals in the industry had the excess capacity to sell, tiding the company over until it could fully restore what was lost.

“This industry is unique in the aspect of the rich heritage built by longstanding family lineages and friendships across companies. We were fortunate to have those to lean on during the intervening years in which we did not have our own distillery,” said Shapira. “The landscape of American whiskey also looked much different in 1996. The production capacity and excess whiskey would not be at the same level today as it was then to help fill any need.”

Heaven Hill got its own distillery again by purchasing Louisville’s Bernheim Distillery from Diageo in 1999, a plant named for bourbon baron Isaac Wolfe Bernheim. That’s the same Bernheim who created the famous, 15,000-acre Bernheim Arboretum located south of Louisville. Acquiring the Bernheim Distillery so soon after the fire allowed Heaven Hill to pick up with making whiskey in its own style. Once again, had the fire happened in 2006 or 2016, it’s doubtful a major distillery would have been available for sale at any price.

In a far cry from 1996’s ashes, after last year’s expansion, Bernheim became the industry’s largest single-facility distillery, capable of filling 400,000 barrels each year. To put that in perspective, Kentucky has 6.8 million barrels of aging bourbon (about a third more than it has people); Bernheim can grow that number by about 6 percent per year, all on its own.

Surviving that fire were 41 barrels, filled in 1989 and 1990, and these were chosen for the Heaven Hill 27-Year-Old Barrel Proof Small Batch. Ultra-aged, cask-strength bourbon is known for being high-proof, but this 27-year-old came out at an unusually low 94.7 proof, with a yield of fewer than 3,000 bottles. Also, whereas old bourbons tend to be oaky, this one came out balanced, personable, and mellow. It’s a whiskey with a story to tell, a very real story full of drama and perseverance, and it tells it well.

By Richard Thomas