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The bottle you see before you has been one of my most anticipated bottles of 2024. I know that might sound absurd if you consider all of the rare and limited releases around the landscape, but let me explain myself and maybe you’ll see why as well.
The Old Grand Dad brand was previously owned by a now-defunct company called National Distillers. There is a longer backstory that I won’t get into here, but what you need to know is that Old Grand Dad bourbon was generally regarded as a very premium bourbon for much of its life.
In 1987, National Distillers sold the Old Grand Dad brand to the company that would eventually become Suntory Global Spirits (which owns other American brands like Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark). It started to become apparent to enthusiasts in the late 1990s that the profile (taste) of the brand had changed. This led to a drop in sales and the brand was relegated to the bottom-shelf. The Old Grand Dad 114 label – which was once the flagship of the whole line – was a shadow of its former self for the next three decades.
How did Old Grand Dad change throughout the years?
The cool thing about the internet is that rumors and theories always seem to come full circle. For almost two decades, rumors persisted of the Old Grand Dad brand being killed off by Beam. Those were proven wrong each time. What was happening was that the brand was distributed in waves – which meant that certain regions went dry for periods of time.
Then there were the theories that Old Grand Dad stopped being a good bourbon because Beam had tinkered too much with how it was previously made. In reality, Jim Beam tried their hardest to make as few changes as possible. They continued using the original mash bill – 63% corn, 27% rye and 10% malted barley. They retained the original yeast. They even tried to keep the still proof (127) and barrel entry proof (120) as close to the original as possible (which were maybe 125 and 112 respectively). The bottom line is that every part of the process is different from all Beam products – save for Basil Haydens.
The things Beam did change are harder to quantify to consumers. Not everyone understands that producing the same recipe on two different column stills can create two very different tasting whiskies (Beam makes OGD on their huge 6′ diameter still at their Clermont campus). Additionally, the tasting panel (a group of individuals with trained palates) changed after the Beam acquisition and continues to change throughout the years. The barrels they were selecting and blending from just weren’t the same. They had to pick a profile that best exemplified what they wanted OGD to taste like. It’s also obvious to many drinkers that the barrels they used to make OGD weren’t aged as long either.
Jim Beam drops clues that they’re going to make Old Grand Dad great again.
For years, enthusiasts begged for a better, older OGD product. They claimed they were willing to put their money where there mouth was, but Beam didn’t seem like they were listening. Then in 2021, Freddie Noe dropped a bomb that he had used a 16-year-old barrel of Old Grand Dad in that year’s Jim Beam edition of the first Bardstown Collection release. What’s odd is that almost nobody seemed to catch the importance of what he said. It was Beam finally pulling back the curtain and telling us “hey, we have some really old OGD barrels sitting around.”
The next 24 months saw Hardin’s Creek – Jacob’s Well (2022 release) use a 15+ year-old “High Rye” Bourbon as part of the blend that was undoubtedly barrels of Old Grand Dad. It was followed by another Bardstown Collection edition in the same year that again saw more Old Grand Dad barrels (this time they were 15-years-old) used in the blend. In 2023, a second (older) release of Jacob’s Well used 17-year-old barrels of OGD. And yet despite all of these releases showcasing that Beam seemed to have significant stocks of teenage OGD barrels in their warehouses, there was nary a peep from the enthusiast community about the possibility of improved Old Grand Dad products in the pipeline.
Finally in 2024, Beam revealed that, yes, they did have large stocks of highly aged OGD they were sitting on. And the best news was that they were going to release it by itself – rather than blending it together with regular Jim Beam. Our (My?) prayers were answered. This would be the first age-stated release of Old Grand Dad and would come in at 16-years-old and bottled at 100 proof.
My bottle was purchased on the secondary market through a guy in Wisconsin. What’s strange is that it was on sale there well before Kentucky. Now that I’ve talked too much about the backstory of this bottle, it’s finally to taste what I’ve been wanting all these years – a version of Old Grand Dad that might give us the closest experience to what they were making back in the 70s and 80s. What will it taste like? Let’s find out. I sampled this neat in a glencairn.
Tasting Notes
Nose: Scents of Snickerdoodle cookies and caramel candies combine with nutmeg and vanilla. Well-developed tannins like seasoned oak and charred wood fill my nostrils. There’s a richness that is hard to describe, but is something close to a sweet cream. Breadfruit and toasted orange peel provide some fruit characteristics, but otherwise I was expecting a little bit more in that category.
Palate: I don’t think that many people would immediately guess that this is a Beam product if they were given it blind. It’s character doesn’t immediately point to any existing Kentucky bourbon on the market. Each sip reveals toasted sugars, caramelized fruits and a spicy rye character that gives off equal parts hot cinnamon and dehydrated herbs. Vanilla bean hides in the background, but adds subtlety.
Going back to the spices for a minute, I’m surprised to find toasted star anise, clove and nutmeg. These spices accentuate every sip with their rye influence. As far as fruit goes, there’s a decent amount of what I like to call “Christmas Fruitcake” notes in there – the kind where all of the fruit is dried and there’s a kind of strange fennel taste to each one. I’m talking about fruit like apricots, cherries, citrus (blood orange?) and raisins. There’s a lot to love here with the complexity and depth. The one thing I’ll ding it on is that it’s not going to knock you back with its power. The experience is more like a surgeon’s scalpel whereas a cask strength offering would be more like a sledgehammer.
Finish: A very pleasant blanket of tannins covers my tongue after the sip is complete. The baking spices remain, but don’t add much heat. All of the fruits mingle together and are hard to decipher. The finish is somewhat sweet and the whole sip makes you think that – yes – you did just drink something with significant age on it.
Score: 8.4/10
The one thing that I can say after multiple sessions with this bottle is how different it tastes from any other Beam product out there. I find that OGD Bottled-in-Bond and 114 versions have some of that telltale Beam nuttiness in it, but this 16-year-old bottle has none of it.
The whole time I drank this, I kept trying to put my finger on which bourbon it’s similar to – then it hit me. Four Roses. It’s not necessarily because the mash bills are similar, but it’s because the high-rye character gives it some brown sugar and fruit characteristics. As I said before, there’s not much in this bottle that it shares with other Beam products.
For being 16-years-old, this bottle is not as over-oaked as you would think it is. What’s there is soft and fragrant and actually quite sweet (over-oaked bourbons typically become bitter). It’s odd that I didn’t find many other tannins with it like leather or tobacco. But then again, most old Beam products don’t become tannin-bombs either. I was expecting something that dried out my tongue and what I found was quite the opposite.
Final Thoughts
This bottle of Old Grand Dad 16 was almost everything I wanted in a bourbon. I honestly loved it, but I felt like the finish was a bit shorter than I wanted it to be and the fruit content wasn’t as varied as I thought it would be for 27% rye.
The big question for many will be “Is this worth $200?” and that’s actually a hard question for me to answer. Originally I told all of my friends it was worth that amount and my reasoning was that this is the first time we’ve had OGD with this age come out. You’re paying for something that frankly, hasn’t existed before.
But the more I got to thinking about it, the more I might say this is overpriced – at least by $50 or so. The reasoning is that after last year’s unexpected smash hit – Hardin’s Creek “The Kentucky Series” and the fact those were in the $170 range (with more proof and age), this bottle begins to look overpriced. That doesn’t mean I’m not happy with my purchase but I would say that if you can’t afford it, don’t worry about buying a bottle. But I do recommend trying to find a pour at a bar or from a friend.
To wrap all of this up, I hope that 2025 will see the release of a 16 year age-stated OGD114 so that we can finally see if proof really would remedy all of the things that OGD16 came up short on. If they do this, I would like to think this could become one of the more perfect bourbons on the market.
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