Tasting "The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste"

May 08, 2023

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How the Hirsch Whiskey of today is continuing the legacy of one of bourbon's most-storied bottles.

Any time you come across a consumer product that's considered the best — whether it's a food, a drink, a luxury product — you have to ask how it earned its reputation. Extreme rarity? Pedigree? Exorbitantly high price tag? Or is it because it offers an experience genuinely better than the competition? In the case of A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16 Year Old Straight Bourbon Whiskey, you can argue that it's all of the above.

Immortalized in Charles K. Cowdery's 2012 book The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste, A.H. Hirsch Reserve is something of a final boss for bourbon fans. It's rare, it's expensive, its history involves bourbon royalty and it's said to have a taste that's out of this world. I recently had the opportunity to try this Holy Grail of whiskeys while spending time with the recently-resurrected Hirsch Whiskey brand in Bardstown, Kentucky. How was it? I can tell you, but first I need to tell you a story.

The whiskey's story began back in 1974, when a banker named A.H. Hirsch (well, Adolph Hirsch, usually referenced by his initials for obvious reasons) commissioned 400 barrels of bourbon from what was, at the time, one of the oldest distilleries in the United States. The distillery near Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania — which would eventually become known as the original Michter's Distillery — sat on a site with a history of spirits distilling stretching back to 1753. The facility would be added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

On this hallowed ground for historic hooch, the distillery's then-master blender, Dick Stoll, got to work crafting Hirsch's bourbon. The late Stoll, who grew to be a legend in his own right, had learned much of his bourbon-making skills from C. Everett Beam — grandnephew of Jim Beam. Stoll used a bourbon mashbill of 75% corn, 13% rye, and 12% malted barley, a classic recipe that still shows up across the Beam Suntory portfolio today in bottles from Jim Beam, Knob Creek and Wild Turkey.

After the 400 barrels were filled, the whiskey was left to age until nearly 16 years later when Michter's Distillery declared bankruptcy and went out of business in 1989. With no grander plan for his commissioned hooch, Hirsch sold the barrels to a liquor store owner and bourbon industry vet named Gordon Hue as the distillery was closing its doors. Hue had a hand in launching Van Winkle Family Reserve a few years earlier with Pappy Van Winkle's grandson, Julian Van Winkle III, and he enlisted the younger Van Winkle again to bottle the 400 barrels of 16-year-old whiskey in 1991.

At the time, bourbon of such vintage was quite rare and had a limited market in the US. Naming it after the man who bottled it, Hue priced his A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16 Year Old bourbon at a premium and sold most of it to the Japanese market, which had a tremendous thirst for international whiskey — including bourbon. But after the Japanese economy crashed in the 1990s, Hue was left with unsold stock. These remaining bottles and the rights to the Hirsch brand were later acquired by spirits importer Priess Imports, who then rebottled most of the remaining stock in 2003 in more ornate bottles topped with gold foil. This version remains the most iconic bottling of A.H. Hirsch Reserve.

A.H. Hirsch Reserve's 2000s relaunch was perfectly timed to ignite a still-sleepy bourbon market. The final bottling took place in 2009, when it was priced at $1,500 per bottle. By then, word had obviously gotten out that the liquid was something special. With no whiskey left to sell and most of it either drunk, exported or both, Cowdery published his book detailing the complete history of the whiskey in 2012 — while also describing its taste as one of the finest bourbons ever made.

This further drove a furor that hasn't abated to this day, and its draw is hard to deny thanks to a perfect storm of factors that add up to a whiskey collector's dream bottle:

It was very expensive when new, and now? It's no wonder that what few bottles remain are among the priciest bourbons you can find, with the average price today nearly $8,000.

But the Hirsch story does not stop with the final bottling of A.H. Hirsch Reserve in 2009. Preiss Imports, the brand's current owner, was itself acquired by San Francisco's Hotaling & Co, a distiller and spirits importer with a roster that includes such diverse brands as Italy's Luxardo, Japan's Nikka Whisky and San Francisco's own Old Potrero Whiskey. And in 2020, Hotaling resurrected the Hirsch name in the form of a new brand called Hirsch Selected Whiskeys.

It's easy to see the revival as a cynical cash grab — an attempt to capitalize on a legendary name in bourbon by slapping it on some unconnected product. We see it all the time in the watch industry, with the rights to long-extinct Swiss brands being snatched up by savvy businessmen looking to skip the hard part of building a name and reputation for a new brand. Sometimes, it doesn't go so well, but other times these resurrections are as good — if not better — than their progenitors. So where does Hirsch fit on that spectrum?

The connection between the original A.H. Hirsch Reserve and the Hirsch Whiskey of today is spiritual at best. Like A.H. Hirsch Reserve, Hirsch's modern whiskeys are something of a group effort. It's not a vertically-integrated brand. Instead, Hirsch sources whiskeys from around the country and is upfront about its mashbills, putting all of that information right on the brightly-colored label of every bottle. And like the people who came together to make the original Hirsch Whiskey a reality, the modern brains behind Hirsch are constantly in search of the next great bourbon.

"We're transparent about our sourcing, and we never settle on one style of whiskey," says Hirsch Head Blender Kevin Aslan. "Horizon is all Indiana, The Bivouac is all Kentucky and the brand itself started in 1974 in Pennsylvania." The Bivouac, which was the second bottle produced by the reborn Hirsch and is part of the brand's core line, took direct inspiration from that fabled 1974 Pennsylvania bourbon. "We redesigned one of the mashbills in The Bivouac to be reflective of the A.H. Hirsch 16-Year by focusing on the malted barley content," says Aslan.

San Fransico native Aslan is tall and bespectacled with a mustache that would make Magnum P.I. jealous. His soft-spoken and calculated way of speaking almost forces you to lean in to ensure you don't miss anything important. He's nerdy in exactly the way you'd want a mad scientist of his ilk to be — his alter ego is an Instagram page called Pikabreww that pairs craft beer cans with their aesthetically-equivalent Pokémon cards — and he really knows his stuff when it comes to blending bourbon.

I visited Hirsch Selected Whiskeys at one of the brand's partner distilleries: the Bardstown Bourbon Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, the bourbon capital of the world. To describe Bardstown's sparkling 100-acre facility as impressive would be an understatement. It's sprawling, with state-of-the-art infrastructure, luxe visitor areas and barrel-packed warehouses as far as the eye can see. Aslan led me and a few others to a glass-walled warehouse stacked with filled bourbon barrels several stories high. It was here where Hirsch had been aging an upcoming single-barrel release for the past eight years. I was able to sample a number of the barrels, taking note of the small but discernible differences between each. The head blender spoke of them as if they were his children: he was having a hard time letting them go after fostering their growth for the better part of a decade. "Did you name them?" I asked. Aslan just laughed and shook his head. Maybe next time.

The barrels I tasted will make their way to stores in September as a limited Bourbon Heritage Month release, but they'll just be the latest in what is fast becoming an acclaimed tradition of single-barrel releases from Hirsch. The most recent, released in May around the time of my visit, was The Single Barrel Double Oak. Like other Hirsch releases, it's heavy on experimentation in the pursuit of excellence.

"We wanted to be a little bit deliberate about the proofing of the double-oaked," says Aslan. "We proof down the whiskey to 112.5 proof before going into the second barrel, as we wanted to give it a more mellow and softer extraction. The second barrel was a new char number one barrel, and we thought this was exciting because you normally don't see char number one barrels used, so we thought this would be really interesting for whiskey enthusiasts to taste."

While getting the chance to sample bourbon from several of Hirsch's barrels during my visit to Bardstown was indeed pretty great, it wasn't the best whiskey I tasted during my visit. Following my warehouse sampling, myself and a handful of other were led to the rare whiskeys library at Bardstown. I was seated at a long table in an intimate room where the walls were lined with a murderer's row of rare and impressive bottles: Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve 23 Year, John E. Fitzgerald Very Special Reserve 20 Year, a full set of Old Crow Chessmen ... the list goes on. But sitting on the table, next to a copy of The Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste, was a bottle of A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16 Year Old Straight Bourbon Whiskey. It sure looked like I was about to prove the title of Cowdery's book wrong.

Sure enough, Glencairn tasting glasses were filled with the storied liquid that had begun its journey to me 49 years ago a couple states over in Pennsylvania. The bottle we were drinking from was of the "gold foil" variety in its artisanal glass bottle, the last batch of A.H. Hirsch Reserve 16 that will ever be produced. In the glass, the honey-colored hooch had legs for days — unsurprising given its advanced age. On the nose, it's extremely sweet. I got a distinct and overwhelming smell of orange creamsicle, a mix of citrus and vanilla that was just delightful. At this point, the anticipation was excruciating, and it was time to see what all the fuss was about.

So how did it taste? Pretty outstanding. For me, it was heavy on the vanilla and candy sweet. It's one of the sweetest bourbons I've ever tried, with an almost ethereal softness and no burn at all. The finish lingered for only a brief moment, making me long for another glass — an impossibility, as rumors were swirling around the table that Bardstown would soon be offering some of their stock to well-heeled distillery visitors at a rate of $2,000 a pour.

So how much of my love for this bourbon came from the actual taste versus the history? I'll never know the answer to that. But I do know that tasting A.H. Hirsch Reserve lived up to the hype for me. Would I pay eight grand for a bottle of it? No, but I wouldn't pay eight grand for a bottle of anything. But some people will, and those who have the means are unlikely to be disappointed.

As for the whiskeys being put out by Hirsch today, I can't say that they resemble A.H. Hirsch Reserve at all. But they are damn fine whiskeys, being crafted by people who really care about what they're doing and who are determined to bring interesting and unexpected bourbons to the market. So who knows, maybe one day a few decades, we'll be talking about a Hirsch Selected Whiskeys single barrel as the next "Best Bourbon You'll Never Taste."