I first chased Bourbon County in 2013. I’ve enjoyed it going back to the first time I experienced it at FOBAB 2012. I still like the Bourbon County brand. My wife and I were married in their barrel warehouse. We’ve attended charity events and brewer-led tastings where BCBS is born. I’ve often felt compelled to defend their product as their contemporaries have begun firehosing lactose and dextrose into their products for viscosity and the ever elusive thick body texture appeal, to the continually fickle beer 1%ers. Bourbon County for better or worse seemed to ignore this trend and continue with an arguably more pure product, true to it’s origins and chasing the trend less.
News of their 2024 release has left me feeling like they’re playing through everything left in their brand catalog to spike attention around this year’s release as they follow up on recent years re-issued versions of Bourbon County Brand Vanilla Stout, Bramble, Backyard, Prop 14 and now Vanilla Rye. All of these were generally perceived as adequate but somehow falling short of their romanticized origins.
The first Rare was Pappy 23 barrels. Admittedly difficult and hard to come by. A beer that appreciated in both value and some would argue taste, in the years that followed.
The second one was driven by 35 year old Heaven Hill barrels that were lost to the sheer size and scale of the Heaven Hill warehouses and found again. Perhaps remarkable in that in 2015 when it was released it was in very short supply and often flipped from between $150-$300. Ironically the supply of 2015 Rares was seemingly found in late 2016-17 when a massive supply hit Chicago retail stores.
This years 2024 Rare with King of Kentucky is seemingly just an upmarket Old Forester with 16 year barrels.
Rare is one of the last cards for Goose Island to play and they’ve burned it on something with a nice but admittedly underwhelming age statement by comparison. King of Kentucky returned to the market in 2018 after being abandoned by Brown-Forman for 50 years from 1968 to 2018. Previously it was a mid-tier blended whiskey. But a boisterous brand like King of Kentucky seemed like a great way for Brown-Forman to create a new high end product, in low supply, to compete and perhaps siphon interest in the annual release of the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection.
In recent years Goose Island has largely failed to create a new variant that the public has anxiously bought up en masse or clamored for the return of. Instead, every year Goose Island reaches into the nostalgia bag to grab a variant from their golden years, when apparently we were all drunk on our own infallibility with this unwavering belief that the good times were going to last forever.
But the good times have run out. The days of razzling BCBS pre-sales at 3x the cost are over. The dudes chasing Goose distro trucks on Black Friday after camping overnight at Binny’s for release have come and gone. The scumbag independent liquor stores selling variants at or above secondary prices sadly still remain.
The much loved Bourbon County brand that people eagerly spent $150-$220 for release bundles of can now be had regularly for 80% off just a few months after release
Which brings us back to Rare. The last card left in the Bourbon County deck that Goose has left to play. Driven by its least legendary barrels they’ve used, of the 3 releases it’s experienced.
A $25 beer, in what could be a $60 release. An artful, classy package with colors that suggest the box would be best stored in a personal library filled with many leather bound books, that smells of rich mahogany. But a beer that will likely be compared more reasonably with the previous Blantons, Old Forester 150, Birthday Bourbon and Eagle Rare variants. Stellar unadjuncted barrel aged Stout with impressive branding, but living far below the means of the Rare PVW income tax tier.
The equivalent of wearing a Ferragamo belt on some Levi’s 505s.
Breweries continue to close as the market contracts. Craft beer junkies who jumped into a trend in the late 10s have moved on, whether that’s to seltzers, THC drinks, or 1mg doses of Ozempic, and it doesn’t appear obvious they’re coming back.
Leave it to Goose Island to jam up the diehards they still have, left one last time before price fatigue burns the rest of us out entirely.
Koel Story Bro 