Making the experience of super-luxury spirits crazily affordable and accessible!
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- Suggested retail price: $750
- This Thursday at 6:30 p.m., we're pouring a one-ounce pour for $19
Excerpts from Jack Bettridge's wonderful 2009 article in Cigar Afficionado:
"Rye enthusiasts are once again asked to take the bad with the good as Heaven Hill releases the next installment of its super-aged Rittenhouse Very Rare Single-Barrel Straight Rye Whisky in October. The new issue offers the unusual opportunity to drink 25-year-old rye, but it's the last chance. The 3,000 bottles that will be issued represent the end of the successful one-off brand extensions, which included a 21- and 23-year-old within the past three years.
"The Rittenhouse Very Rare collection was a result of serendipity. The original lot of 95 barrels was intended for a private-label customer of Heaven Hill Distillery. The company was aging the whiskey for the customer, which failed to call for it until it was far beyond the intended age. When the rye neared the unusual age of 21 years, Heaven Hill approached the whiskey's owner and offered to buy it back. In 2006, it released the Rittenhouse Very Rare 21-Year-Old Straight Rye Whisky.
"Parker Beam, the Heaven Hill master distiller, says that the whiskey was able to age so long because of its location on the first floor of Rickhouse 00, where the temperatures are lower than on higher floors. Still the rye produced has been extremely spicy. The 100-proof whiskey is released without chill filtering, a process which is used to keep organic residue from clouding... is also a single-barrel whiskey, meaning that it is not the product of mixing several barrels, which is typically done to achieve consistency.
"The taste of the 25-year-old whiskey is predictably full-bodied, although the extra two years aging over the 23-year-old has not caused it to become overly woody or tannic as might be the expectation. It may even have mellowed somewhat after the two previous releases, which were spice bombs."
Thursday Evening, we will open one bottle at precisely 6:30. When it's gone, it's gone.