Michter’s 25 Year Old Bourbon (2023) Review

Don't like ads?

No ads

In 1996, Joe Magliocco had just secured the trademark name of “Michter’s” for a song. It had been abandoned just like the distillery was on Valentine’s Day, 1990. Joe was the successful owner of Chatham Imports – a company that specialized in the distribution of alcohols from around the world – and had wanted to enter the spirits production side of business. This would be his first step.

Working with Steve Ziegler and Dick Newman, he began regular trips to Kentucky in the hopes of securing barrels of bourbon and rye whiskey for cheap. Once they had enough barrels, they could begin filling bottles. This was the easiest and cheapest way to reinvigorate the brand – contract distilling and building their own distillery was still years away.

The trio ended up purchasing a lot of barrels from United Distillers. United Distillers was in the middle of a major shift in the late 1990’s as they transformed into Diageo. UD/Diageo shed brands, facilities and lots of barrels during that time and many of them had considerable age and/or were made by distilleries that were no longer open. While we don’t exactly know the sources of these barrels, many were thought to be distilled at the New Bernheim Distillery. We know that there were also a few Stitzel Weller barrels that were also scooped up.

Joe and his team originally had Julian Van Winkle III bottle many of those barrels for him from roughly 1999 to 2002.  When JVWIII landed the big deal with Sazerac to move his operations over to Frankfort, he introduced Joe to Even Kulsveen at KBD (modern-day Willett) to continue bottling for him. For the next 9 years or so, Even Kulsveen did just that while also selling Joe more barrels of whiskey.

The reason why I laid out that whole story is so you know the lineage of where the barrels used for releases like Michter’s 25 Year Bourbon (and Rye Whiskey) came from. But I didn’t actually give you an answer, I just told you the last entities in possession of the barrels before Michter’s purchased them. Knowing the size and breadth of the barrels that UD and KBD had at their disposal, there’s a non-zero chance that Joe had access to every Kentucky distillery that ever distilled whiskey from the late 1970s up to 2011. Crazy, huh?

Michter’s 25 Year Bourbon Timeline

Michter’s 25 Year Bourbon was a special release that was originally launched in 2008. Early Michter’s 25 year-old products are notoriously hard to determine exact release dates because the way they were labeled and sold were very sporadic. In regards to how they were labeled, anything before 2014 was given an arbitrary barrel (batch?) number. After 2014 they were given the standard date code that they used to this day – Year/Month/Barrel or Batch designator. I’ll use the bottle I’m reviewing today as an example: 23I3017. The 23 represents the year, the letter I represents the month of September and 3017 is some sort of internal designator for the batch.

The way that M25 is sold is also very strange as it seems like these trickle out to different markets and distributors in a very non-linear way. Sometimes a store in California will put out a bottle a full year after a store in New York sold the same batch.

Michter’s waited until 2017 to release the next M25 Bourbon. Following that, it was released again in 2020 and 2023. This long period of time is somewhat commonplace in the Michter’s universe due to the strict quality standards first implemented under the late Willie Pratt. Willie earned the nickname “Dr. No” due to his insistence that a product would not be released until it was ready. This resulted in years passing between releases like in 2022 when they announced they would not release a 10-year bourbon or 2023 and 2020 when they did not release a 20-year bourbon – and those are just a couple examples! The bottom line is that Dr. No is not a nickname for just one man, it’s a position inside the distillery.

The making of Michter’s 25 Year Bourbon

The backwards math on a bottle of M25 from 2023 might seem like the bourbon inside was distilled in 1998, but it doesn’t exactly work like that with Michter’s. During my visit to their Shively Distillery a couple years ago, I was amazed to walk into a room full of 200+ stainless steel drums that contained mature whiskey that had been vatted out of precaution because it was nearing the point of being over-oaked. Obviously the aging stops at that point, but most of these barrels were already 20 years or older. I was also surprised to find out some of them contained barrels that were under 20 years old and were going to be used for M10 some day. Dan McKee explained that their tasters found these barrels were at the peak of flavor but any more and they might become too bitter.

Michter’s 25 Year Bourbon is a batched product likely comprised of more than 7 but less than 20 barrels. Once they are blended to taste, they are put through a proprietary filtering process which can use up to 36 different layers of filters (Michter’s won’t comment on the media type, but I assume it’s silk). This is done to ensure consistency in every batch and to remove certain flavors that they don’t want. Then it’s proofed down to 116.2 proof every time and bottled up. That is quite a lot of proof for the age, but anyone who’s seen the vat of Pappy Van Winkle 23 from Buffalo Trace last year saw that its proof was a Hazmat levels before it was proofed down. Crazy!

Now that I’ve covered all the bases, let’s get into the tasting notes. I know that’s what you’re all here for! I sampled this neat in a glencairn.

Tasting Notes

Nose: Wow, this nose is simply incredible. I was assuming it would be a bit flat and muted, but it feels like it’s bursting with sweets of all kinds and oak. The oxidized and antiqued oak isn’t quite as “soft” as I was thinking it would be, instead it comes out swinging with the full weight of having been aged in that new charred oak for 25 years. It feels more balanced than a Pappy Van Winkle 23 – and it should with the proof being more than 20 points higher. What I’m trying to say it oozes maturity and rides a fine line between the dusty, glut bourbon from the 80s and 90s and a modern day 20+ year old bourbon. I can’t put my finger on why it would have the best of both worlds. Additionally, I get notes like brown butter, toffee and chocolate covered pretzels. Other sweets include fudge and salted caramel. As for the rye notes (I believe this is ryed), I find the lovely scent of camphor. Amazing. This might be one of my favorite bourbons to nose ever.

Palate: What a butterscotch bomb! The opening flavor out of the gate happens to be one of my favorites. This is accompanied by wildflower honey, salted caramel and cinnamon buns with icing. Of course I’m not leaving out the tannins in this opening sequence because the taste is just as old as the nose had me believe. The oak is extremely oxidized, yet stays right on the edge of becoming bitter. It’s also helped a bit by this sort of barrel-aged maple syrup flavor where it’s sweet and woody at the same time. The “woodiness” adds a wallop of age that might not appeal to some, but adds character to each sip.

As for the other flavors, I am finding flavors that further push the idea that this is a ryed bourbon like anise, cinnamon red hots, chili peppers and more of that camphor I was talking about in the nose. Fruit flavors – which I can’t believe I’m finding after two and a half decades in a barrel – include oxidized cherries, wild berry jam and some toasted orange peel.

Finish: A wildly strong finish for a bourbon this old. There is brown butter and oxidized, soft oak that won’t quit after the sip is complete. It’s accompanied by light maple and vanilla which help mute some of the drying notes at the end. Not many fruits remain and the baking spices have blended into the background even though they do keep giving a bit of heat as the finish goes on and on and on.

Score: 10/10

No flashy words are necessary to summarize this bourbon – it ticks the box of literally every scent or flavor that I love (and expect) to find in a bourbon of this quality, age and price. You’re not going to walk away from it thinking “I wish it had this or that” because it gives you absolutely everything you want. That’s no small feat for a bourbon this old. Typically bourbon loses its bright character and fruits begin to melt away behind the wall of oak. Somehow everything remains in place. How is such balance possible? It must be that damn filtering process!

Do I have a guess as to the source(s) of bourbon used for this batch? Off the top of my head, this tastes like there could be a little bit of wheated bourbon distilled at New Bernheim (likely by Ed Foote) and some low-rye bourbon that may have been originally intended for something like IW Harper. There also feels like a barrel or three from Brown-Forman might have found its way into the mix. But I could be completely wrong about all of this and would blame it on the heat-cycling that these barrels all probably went through for a period of time in their lives (because that’s all Michter’s has used, apparently). So it’s anyone’s guess.

Final Thoughts

Words are hard to come by for this bourbon. I know there will be a few haters that will doubt that it could ever be this good. And maybe there is an element of being star-struck that has shifted my mind. But in a way, shouldn’t a bourbon make you feel just as special to behold it as it does to taste it? Can’t that be considered a sort of sensory objective for whiskey producers? I would argue yes. Michter’s 25 Bourbon is likely in the top 1% of all bourbon out there – dusty or not. Do whatever you can to taste one.