It has been four years since I have had a chance to pick up a bottle of Larceny Barrel Proof. Which is a shame since it is one of the best cask strength wheated bourbons out there. This batch, B524, comes in at a hefty 125.4 proof, and is aged between 6 and 8 years. While this is generally young for a wheated bourbon, most Larceny Barrel Proof releases are in this age range. As with all Larceny Barrel Proof releases, this one is uncut and non-chill filtered. As a little bourbon history reminder, Larceny is the reincarnation of Old Fitzgerald, which Heaven Hill acquired when Stitzel Weller went bankrupt, whereas Sazerac got the Weller brand name. Bourbon brand names are as much intellectual property as they are a flavor profile, although Heaven Hill and Sazerac have kept acquired wheated bourbon brands like Weller and Fitzgerald wheated bourbons. There is wisdom and business savvy in that. Prior to bourbon becoming cool again if you acquired a brand you wanted to keep the loyal customers that were going to buy that brand of bourbon no matter what. Post-bourbon boom, it is more about having a cool story that ties your bourbon to a fabled brand of yesteryear that the current customers have only heard of but never tried and trying as much as possible to duplicate the flavor profile for the critics (Boomers) that remember the old brands previous iterations and will cry foul if something in the new release is amiss. As a Gen-X bourbon drinker and indeed connoisseur, I am pretty much on the “marketing schmarketing, does it taste good now” bandwagon.

The color on this is a rich deep amber, with a thin film and thick legs on the swirl. The nose is loaded with caramel up front, with some baked cinnamon roll and oak as well. On the palate, the caramel notes give way to heavy baking spices, clove, some cherry and raisin notes; this bourbon is full flavored with a medium non-syrupy mouthfeel. On the finish, the cherries fade into baking spice and oak tannin. This is a blockbuster wheated bourbon in my opinion, and I prefer it over Weller Full Proof despite how heretical that claim may be. However, I do get a little bit of that peanut funk I get on regular Larceny, which is due to the Beam family wild yeast used by both Beam and Heaven Hill. But, the rest of the flavor profile is so good I just don’t mind, and I really think chill filtering bourbon brings yeast funk to the fore rather than leaving it in the background where it should be.

I am happy to say that Heaven Hill’s Cask Strength Wheated Bourbon, uncut and unfiltered, aged six to eight years, is really good. And despite the story on the back of the bottle, this has nothing to do with a Treasury Agent named John Fitzgerald who used to steal bourbon out of warehouses at a different distillery.

Maybe I am just getting grumpy at turning 53 last week, but I almost want bourbon to go the direction of fine wine and champagne rather than all this marketing bullshit. The label should say who produced it, what’s in it as far as mashbill and yeast, how long it was aged and where, and what it purports to be-high rye, low rye, wheated, or something else. I literally have to dedicate one paragraph of every whiskey review I write to explain what is essentially marketing history and then say why that doesn’t really matter. I wonder about the utility of that for serious bourbon drinkers, but then again I realize that when I visited Sazerac House in New Orleans last weekend they had dozens of bottles of Traveller in the vault, endorsed by a guy who wrote about Tennessee Whiskey and there is not one drop of that in Traveller. But, maybe this is why this blog is here – to go behind the label, say what a whiskey really is, and what I think about it.

Bourbon brands are bullshit. But Heaven Hill’s B524 Wheated Bourbon aged six to eight years is top drawer.