When aging the world’s best whiskeys, maturation is often carefully controlled. Barrels are closely monitored, with samples pulled and analyzed at regular intervals. Exceptional casks are earmarked for special, highly aged releases years or even decades in advance. Legendary bottlings are usually the culmination of repeat testing, a process that’s both time consuming and skill intensive.
It can also happen entirely by accident.
Such was the case with Rittenhouse Very Rare Single Barrel Rye, a series of 21-, 23-, and 25 year-old whiskeys released between 2006 and 2009. Distilled, aged, and bottled by Heaven Hill in Bardstown, the whiskey came from a run of 95 misplaced barrels that at one point were almost entirely lost. The lineup has since become one of the most sought-after collections of American rye.
Today, bottles command up to $3,000 at auction.
“These bad boys are absolutely in the upper tier of highly aged American ryes,” says Zev Glesta, spirits specialist at Sotheby’s in New York City. “They’re single-barrel Heaven Hill releases from older stock, bottled at 100 proof and 20-plus years. Pretty much the three-it combo that knocks out a lot of riffraff.”
For drinkers, the whiskey itself is more than just a great pedigree. These bottles have built a cult following, inviting endless discussion and flavor comparisons between barrels.
“I will die on that hill of these being some of the best whiskeys I have ever had,” says Rob Bramble, a whiskey aficionado who has collected the highly aged ryes for nearly a decade.
Rittenhouse Very Rare is a story of chance and opportunity, resulting in one of the biggest happy accidents in whiskey history. It’s also a tale of rye’s phoenix-like rise from the lowest rungs of American spirits. Caught between eras, the barrels sat undisturbed in an ideal location, leading to an astonishing rediscovery that, 20 years later, still has those involved amazed it even happened.
An Accidental Discovery
In 2005, longtime Heaven Hill employee Jodie Filiatreau was conducting a routine check when he stumbled upon barrels that shouldn’t have existed.
“One day I was in the warehouse at [our Schenley campus],” he recalls. “I was looking for space for entry in Rickhouse OO, which was a one-story flat house. It’s six ricks tall, with 34-barrel ricks. I came across these barrels on the first floor, and I happened to look at the barrelhead and saw it was rye whiskey.”
“So I called into the office and said, ‘Do you all know we have these old extra-aged rye barrels in this warehouse?’ They looked through the record and said, ‘No, we don’t.’”
“So I said, ‘Yeah, you do.’”
Today, Filiatreau is well known as the artisanal distiller at downtown Louisville’s Evan Williams Urban Experience. Back in 2005, he was a warehouse supervisor, and finding an errant barrel or two wasn’t shocking. Indeed, he’d seen his fair share of improbable events since starting with the company in 1981. One was the catastrophic 1996 distillery fire. On another occasion, a local quarry explosion sent a football-sized chunk of rock crashing through a warehouse roof. Filiatreau discovered the aftermath, which included a demolished cask of whiskey.
But finding 95 mystery barrels of rye — over 5,000 gallons of capacity — was another thing entirely. Beyond the existence of the barrels itself, what struck Filiatreau immediately was their age. The whiskey had been made at Heaven Hill’s Bardstown distillery 1984, and at that point, the barrels were over 20 years old.
“I thought: It’s kind of odd to have rye whiskey in a one-story Schenley flathouse,” Filiatreau says. “We did some research and found out we had sold these barrels to one of our partners, and they never used them.”
It turns out that while Heaven Hill had distilled the whiskey, it didn’t actually own it — at least not yet.
“We had a rye whiskey bulk contract with our distributor in Maryland, which makes perfect sense because really Maryland and Pennsylvania were the centers of rye,” says Larry Kass, then Heaven Hill’s director of corporate communications.
The distributor, which was known as Churchill, later became part of alcohol distributing giant Breakthru Beverage Group. Kass recalls that the Heaven Hill team realized that Churchill hadn’t taken its allocation in a number of years, allowing it to incidentally build up a large inventory of aged rye.
“Nowadays, we put an RFID tag on every barrel as it’s filled, so we know exactly where that barrel is for its entire life,”Kass says. “Back then, they were in a ledger book, and once in a while, we would lose some barrels. Somebody might spill something on the ledger, all sorts of things could happen. But to this day, I don’t know exactly what happened with these.”
It wasn’t just that the barrels had been forgotten. Because of their unusual location — the first level of a rickhouse, where cooler conditions allow whiskey to age slower — the rye had eclipsed the two-decade mark with remarkable balance.
“We would always kind of pooh-pooh those single-level rickhouses,” Kass says. “But this was one of those situations where if it was in any other rickhouse or floor, it probably would have been way past its sell-by date. Because it was in that single, flat rickhouse, it was really good after 20 years. And for some reason, these were on the first floor. So I don’t know if they got loaded up on a truck wrong or something.”
“I thought: It’s kind of odd to have rye whiskey in a one-story Schenley flathouse. We did some research and found out we had sold these barrels to one of our partners, and they never used them.”
Kass was immediately impressed by the quality of the product and likened it to “discovering liquid gold.” He and his team thought the whiskey could and should be part of something special. But that could only happen if Churchill was willing to sell.
“We approached Churchill and we said, ‘We’d like to buy, you don’t want these old barrels, do you?’ And they said, ‘No, we’ll let you buy them back.’”
Going to Market
Of course, discovering the whiskey and selling it were two separate things. Up until the 2000s, rye was largely a forgotten category in American spirits. Heaven Hill was one of the few companies still making rye, which it would often distill just one or two days per year. Then, as it does today, the company generally produced rye from a mash bill just over the 51 percent legal threshold, a “Kentucky-style” recipe that allowed for a relatively high corn component. A portion of that whiskey generally went to partners — like Churchill — that had contracted Heaven Hill to produce rye for them.
“Everybody had a bottle of [rye], but nobody used it for very much,” Kass says. “And all of a sudden, around 2001 or 2002, it got rediscovered by bartenders, and it really started to get hot.”
Kass retired from Heaven Hill in 2019 after 22 years with the company. For him, the story of Rittenhouse Very Rare isn’t just about the barrels themselves, but a reflection on the rebirth of rye.
“This whole project is kind of like a microcosm of the rye whiskey industry at the time,” he says, “because we all had our little supply of aging barrels, and that was plenty for us back in the day. Then all of a sudden it got hot, and that was it.”
Kass thought the barrels would be best marketed as Rittenhouse Straight Rye Whisky, a brand Heaven Hill acquired in 1993. At the time, the distillery was also making Pikesville Rye; it continues to sell both brands today.
“We had decided several years before, when we saw the rye market was stirring back to life, to support one brand as our premium rye. So that was Rittenhouse,” Kass says.
In the end, Kass and team decided the whiskey was special enough to warrant the single barrel treatment, a far less common practice at the time. In 2006, Heaven Hill officially launched Rittenhouse 21 Year Very Rare Single Barrel Rye, a release of 31 single barrels at 100 proof.
As far as age statements, the rye had few peers on the market. And though it quickly found fans, the bottles — which retailed for a range of prices between $85 and $150 — didn’t always fly off shelves.
“A lot of distributors didn’t want them,” Bernie Lubbers, a longtime global whiskey ambassador for Heaven Hill, told Bourbon Lore. “In some instances we had to buy them back. It was a hard sell.”
Owing to growing demand for rye and premium American whiskey in general, Kass and others had conviction the bottles would find an audience. In 2007, Heaven Hill announced the 23-year-old batch, totalling 25 barrels with an MSRP around $175. Industry awards heaped praise on the release, which was awarded a double gold medal and “Best Rye Whiskey” at the 2007 San Francisco Spirits Competition.
Hype gradually grew, and in 2009, the rest of the barrels hit the market with a 25-year age statement and $190 price tag. According to a company press statement at the time, that final release totaled around 3,000 bottles, with distribution in the U.S., U.K., France, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
Building a Legacy
For years after, bottles of Rittenhouse Very Rare were still available at some original retail outlets. It was still the very early days of the bourbon boom, and three-figure price tags could be a tough sell, even for the most coveted American whiskeys. Postings from the era’s popular forums like Straightbourbon.com abound, with fans comparing notes to determine which barrels were worth the price.
But it was only a matter of time before demand grew hot and pulled Rittenhouse Very Rare up with it. Today, resale prices generally range between $1,800 and $3,000. Still, in a high-end market where famed ryes like Red Hook and Michter’s 25 command upwards of $30,000 at auction, the old Rittenhouses remain something of a bargain for a certain tier of collector.
“They are treasures, and honestly, still incredibly well priced for the high age statement ryes out there,” says Glesta, who has brought numerous bottles of Rittenhouse Very Rare to auction. “We have seen some pretty great results with these bottles, but I still find them to be great value versus a lot of the other 20- to 25-year ryes. Yes, there is some variance, and yes the wooden tube always falls apart, but these are truly mythical beasts in the wild ready to be pounced upon.”
“Yes, there is some variance, and yes the wooden tube always falls apart, but these are truly mythical beasts in the wild ready to be pounced upon.”
Adding to the mystique is the quality of the liquid itself, with a profile that flexes age while remaining eminently drinkable.
“At 100 proof they retain good rye spice, and the spice cuts through the oakiness (much like a good squirt of lemon can change anything fried),” Glesta says. “Single-barrel variation is real. There are some dud barrels out there that show more oxidative notes, but I have had a 25-year that is as sweet as can be, like an old fruit leather, which you can chew on for hours because it gets stuck in your molars. The 25 is by far my favorite, and all you oak haters can eat a stave.”
Bramble agrees approachability is a huge part of the Rittenhouse appeal.
“Even at a relatively low 100 proof, the flavor and depth is second to none,” he says. “I will never forget my first sip of a 21-year. I immediately started uncontrollably smiling. It blew me away. Every single pour, every single bottle I have gotten to try, has done the same thing to me.”
For Bramble, variation among the barrels is a significant selling point, one that still pushes him to find and try new bottles. “I have had at least three different barrels from each release,” he says. “I’ve never come across a bad one.”
A Story to Be Told, Not Repeated
While Rittenhouse Very Rare’s background isn’t exactly a trade secret, it’s one where oral history has invited a fair share of speculation, some of it likely flawed. For example, some informal sources suggest the whiskey was from a batch of Bernheim-distilled rye, from a similar run alleged to be the source for bottlings like Red Hook.
During our interview, Kass confirmed the distillate was fully Heaven Hill’s, produced at the company’s Bardstown distillery. That’s supported in forum posts by whiskey writer and historian Chuck Cowdery, who was among a small group to sample Rittenhouse Very Rare prior to its 2006 release.
Still, there are some pieces of the tale even those involved didn’t put together until recently: “I was about today years old when I realized that Jodie himself was the one that actually found these barrels,” Kass remarked during our chat.
The Rittenhouse story is unique. Changes in modern distilling make it incredibly unlikely we’ll see another accidental boon on the same size and scale. After all, misplacing nearly 100 barrels doesn’t exactly help a distillery’s bottom line. For Kass, that makes Rittenhouse Very Rare all the more special.
“Nowadays, using the RFID system, you’re probably not going to have a perfect storm again, because everything is as accounted for. I remember joking with our chief financial officer at the time who hated all this stuff,” Kass says.
“But we loved it.”
The article The Accidental Origin of One of History’s Best Rye Whiskeys appeared first on VinePair.