Review #258: 2013 Elijah Craig 23yr (Pre-Fire Heaven Hill)

MASH BILL: 75% corn, 13% rye, 12% malted barley

AGE: 23 yrs

PROOF: 90

COST: $100 for 1.5oz pour (The Diller Room, Seattle, WA) The going rate for this unopened 750mL bottle today (2026) is about $1800-$2400. MSRP in 2013 was $200.

I love unexpected finds when traveling, and this one was a pure fluke.

I had a couple of days to burn in Seattle before heading to eastern Washington for a business trip. Walking down 1st Avenue on my way to an underground tour, I passed The Diller Room. I’d walked past it on previous trips and meant to check it out but had never actually stepped inside.

Three hours later, I was standing at their bar, taking in an impressive whiskey selection.

Their international lineup was sharp, but the American whiskey selection was enough to give your average tater an instant coronary. The spread of coveted Buffalo Trace expressions was formidable, but I kept scanning for the real gems tucked away in the shadows. Row after row delivered: a smorgasbord of Old Fitzgerald decanters, a selection of Wild Turkey Master’s Keep, various vintages of Birthday Bourbon, and a heavy flex of Michter’s (including a barrel strength rye I’ve been hunting).

As my eyes drifted toward the Scotch and Japanese whisky, I circled back for one final pass across the top shelf of the American side to read a few years more closely on some BTAC bottles. That’s when something caught my eye.

Tucked into the far corner, sitting out of place among a sea of BTAC bottles on the same shelf was the fat, oval contour of an older Elijah Craig bottle, complete with pinstriping and a bold 23 on the label. My brain immediately started running the timeline math: 2010s bottling run... 23-year age statement...that means this is potentially extra aged pre-fire Heaven Hill liquid.

I was intrigued.

I pointed it out to the bartender. Pulling it down, he realized it was entirely unopened, and a few seconds later realized further it was so new to their inventory that it hadn't even been assigned a price in their system. To get me a price he’d need to check with the owner, who was just out front. "No rush," I said, ordering a cocktail before he stepped away to attend to the line that was starting to form behind me.

Truthfully, I needed a minute to set a hard limit in my mind. I landed on $100 with the caveat it turned out to be pre-fire DSP-KY-31 stock. Now, let’s be clear: logically, no whiskey on Earth is worth $100 for a single 1.5-ounce pour. I’ve never dropped that kind of money on a dram in my life. But I was on a business trip, my expenses were covered for the rest of the week starting tomorrow, and this was a bottle currently commanding a couple thousand on the secondary market. Why not splurge?

Ten minutes later, the bartender found me. "Owner says $100 a pour." (Telepath? Damn…) There was only one thing left to verify. After seeing the 1990 barreling date, it was a done deal.

Without further ado, let’s see how this neck pour from this piece of Bardstown history holds up in the glass and then really dive into the pre-fire HH mash bill.

Reviewed neat in a Glencairn.

APPEARANCE: Dark sherry (1.8), quite oily on the sides of the glass.

NOSE: Rich sweetness leads off with stone fruit, Luxardo cherry syrup, and caramelized brown sugar. Barrel character starts cutting through the sweeter notes with cocoa powder, oak oozing vanillin and tannins, and a dash of cinnamon powder. After nosing this for a while, the sweeter notes become less prominent, and the spice and vanillin rich oak steals the show along with a touch of dried herbs.

PALATE: The mouthfeel is thin at first, but then I realize a few sips in that an oily film lingers on my palate. Tannic oak and white pepper right at the front of the palate. Dark, rich sweetness with Luxardo cherries caramelized in dark brown sugar and a touch of tart blackberry slowly spread across the palate. A sprig of mint, dried sage, and lemon peel add some brightness. I get noticeably more herbal notes and less fruit than modern day Elijah Craig.

FINISH: Long, dry finish. Not very complex with primarily lots of tannic oak. There is a touch of caramelized sugar to add some sweetness, and some dried sage and white pepper to continue with the herbal spice that was present throughout the rest of the sip.

RATING: 7.8/10

OVERALL: I went into this pour not expecting it to be a top-rated whiskey for me. I imagined this being a cross between a pre-fire Heaven Hill bourbon I tried and EC18, neither of which particularly impressed me. So, a 10/10 wasn’t expected (though surprises are always welcome). What I was seeking was an opportunity to pick apart pre-fire Heaven Hill juice and 23-year-old juice to boot! While I can’t find anything where Heaven Hill has stated on record that their bourbon mash bill changed after moving production to Bernheim after the Bardstown fire, there’s plenty of information out there that suggests it did. After experiencing a couple different pre-fire pours now, I’m convinced it changed.

The profile of this whiskey, as well a pre-fire Anderson Club 15 I’ve had, are just different enough in a similar way that it seems non-trivial, and from a technical standpoint I think the theory is supported. But before I dive into that in the Behind the Bottle section, overall, this is a very tannic, herbal pour. It does have some rich, dark sweetness throughout, but it has me longing for more of those notes as they’re not nearly as pronounced as modern Heaven Hill bourbon. The modern Heaven Hill bourbon profile aligns with my palate much better than this pre-fire mash bill profile. (Keep in mind, this is a single barrel, so mileage may vary based on the barrel.)

Behind the Bottle

On November 7, 1996, a lightning strike started a fire at the Heaven Hill distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky that would eventually claim 7 warehouses and over 92,000 barrels of whiskey before finally being extinguished. While Heaven Hill lost nearly 15% of their storage capacity, the loss of the actual distillery building was the most crippling casualty of the fire. As HH was reeling after the disaster, other distilleries came to their aid offering to help distill their “signature mashbill” to be aged in the company’s own barrels and rickhouses. Somehow their proprietary yeast strain survived the fire and continued to be used for production of their recipe to present day. While this has been debated and some believe the yeast changed, thus leading to a different profile of pre-fire and modern bourbon from them, HH has openly stated that their yeast did survive the fire being protected by a thick-walled refrigerator on the 5th floor of the distillery. But the “signature mashbill” part has received less support by the distillery with no confirmation that the mash bill is still the same, only that they use terms like “signature mashbill” to imply that it’s a historic recipe and hasn’t changed. But there’s a lot of industry insiders that have stated the mash bill changed after this event. So, let’s explore the technical reasons behind a potential change in mash bill.

As Heaven Hill was still recovering from the disaster, an opportunity presented itself in 1999 when United Distillers decided to sell the Bernheim Distillery to HH. There were many differences that made the Bernheim Distillery a major upgrade over the former Old Heaven Hill Springs distillery in Bardstown. I’m going to focus on the main difference that I think supports the change in mash bill the most: the still material.

Before we get into the comparison of the stills at each distillery, let’s cover why copper is a very important material for whiskey distillation. Whiskey distillation is essentially the process of extracting the alcohol and desirable flavor-bearing compounds from a fermented mash of grains (the wash). The fermentation that is used for whiskey is almost exclusively from yeast. The metabolic process for yeast to ferment requires sulfur, which the yeast finds in the grains that are used. When the yeast is stressed out during the fermentation because of a bad environment for them or dead yeast are allowed to remain in the fermented liquid long enough to start breaking down, the sulfur compounds the yeast consume in the fermentation process can find its way back into the fermented liquid. If you’ve ever smelt sulfur before, it goes without saying that it’s not a pleasant smell or taste to have in whiskey. Enter copper!

While copper certainly makes a still look charming, bright, and rich, copper isn’t used for appearance. It plays a critical role in removing the off flavors that can be caused by sulfur compounds in your distillate. These sulfur compounds generally have low boiling points which means they vaporize early in the distillation process. As a vapor, these sulfur compounds flow over the surface of the copper. Because of its chemical properties, copper readily reacts with these sulfur compounds to form copper sulfide, which exists as a solid and falls out of the vapor and collects in the bottom of the still.

To summarize, sulfur compounds are generally present in a whiskey wash because of the fermentation process and natural presence in the grains, and copper plays an important role in removing sulfur from the vapor in the distillation process. Now, we haven’t quite gotten nerdy enough yet, so let’s get the calculators out!

The Old Heaven Hill Springs distillery (I’ll simply refer to it as the Bardstown distillery going forward) had a single all copper column still. I can’t find conclusive records on its dimensions, but very conclusive that it was an all copper still. HH states that the amount of new make whiskey the Bardstown distillery could produce was about 1/3 of the Bernheim Distillery though, so I surmise that the still was around the diameter and height of one of the stills at Bernheim. Because over at the newly acquired Bernheim Distillery, HH took on three stills that are each 6 feet in diameter and 70 feet tall and collectively capable of producing nearly 1500 barrels of new make whiskey a day. The three stills at Bernheim are stainless steel columns with copper rectifying plates.

Let’s assume the column stills were all the same physical size. At 6ft diameter and 70ft tall, that’s about 1376 sq ft of copper in the internal wall of the still at the Bardstown distillery that the stills at Bernheim wouldn’t have.

There’s a lot of fluid mechanics that goes into the spacing of the rectifier plates in a column still, but for simplicity, let’s use 20 inches which should be a decent average for a still of this size. If the plates are assumed to be 6 ft diameter, that would mean that there are 42 plates totaling about 1187 sq ft of surface area on the bottom side of the plates. I’m not including the area of the top side of each plate since it isn’t providing much, if any, contact with the vapor since they’re mostly going to have a film of distiller’s beer and condensation on them.

Between 1187 sq ft of plates and 1376 sq ft of the still wall you have the potential for vapor to interact with about 2563 sq ft of copper. However, if the column is made of stainless steel, you immediately lose nearly 54% of the potential for vapor to interact with copper! That’s huge! Now, I realize that I have simplified a complex engineering design into a tube and a few discs and gave them all the same chance to interact with the vapor. In reality, there’s a lot of other things going on inside a still that would need to be considered: the flow regime isn’t uniform resulting in more reflux in some areas than others affecting the ability for interaction, column packing (usually copper as well) may be used to help pull away reflux from the walls in some areas and can also contribute to interactions, other structures, materials, and piping may run through a still or along the walls that prevents potential interaction opportunities, etc. But I think my point still stands that there is a non-trivial amount of copper that is not present in the Bernheim stills that was present in the Bardstown still.

So, how does all this support a change in the mash bill? We know that the Heaven Hill bourbon mash bill is 78% corn, 10% rye, and 12% malt today. For those that have suggested a different pre-fire mash bill (or more specifically, a pre-Bernheim mash bill), 75% corn, 13% rye, 12% malt is generally referred to as correct. This means that 3% of the mash bill moved from the rye component to the corn component when they moved to the Bernheim distillery.

Rye has more sulfur compounds than corn because it’s higher in proteins, and the proteins in grains are particularly high in sulfur containing amino acids. This is how sulfur gets into the mash to fuel the yeast for the fermentation process. Simply put, if there is more sulfur present in rye than corn, then having a mash that is higher in rye means you’ll have a higher sulfur loading and more chance of sulfur compounds in the wash.

Now, let’s bring it all together. Heaven Hill buys Bernheim and head distiller Parker Beam immediately recognized that the stills at Bernheim had less copper present to remove sulfur compounds during distillation. So, he made a conscious decision to reduce the rye content in the mash bill and increase the corn in order to reduce the total amount of sulfur present in the fermented mash. I actually think Heaven Hill tries and gives us a hint to this on their website. Presently (August 2026), on their Our Distilleries page where it shows the history timeline, if you select the 1999 node the focus is on the move from Bardstown to Bernheim and the following is stated at the bottom:





When you look at this statement compared to what is presented on all the other nodes of the timeline, this is oddly specific and technical. But more importantly, this shows that Parker was sensitive to the fact he was losing a lot of copper with these new stills, and he appreciated what the copper does for his distillate. I can very much see a scenario in which he did the quick back of the napkin calculation I did above and saw that he was losing a large amount of copper surface area in the move and used a few different levers he had control of to try and make sure he prevented off-putting sulfur notes from getting into his new distillate at Bernheim.


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