Aged oak | Cigar box | Toasted cinnamon stick | Brown sugar | Dark caramel

Brown sugar | Marzipan | Nougat | Spiced caramel | Rye spice | Charred oak | Dried tobacco leaf

Charred aged oak | Rye spice | Cinnamon powder | Nutmeg | Brown sugar | Plump raisin | Faint vanilla powder | Lingering gentle spice & aged oak

Heaven Hill is home to six distinct aging sites, with the Deastville campus being well known among the brand’s fans. Originally home to the T.W. Samuels Distillery, Heaven Hill has been overseeing these rickhouses since the early 1980s. Now home to nine Heaven Hill rickhouses, the company has 167,000 barrels aging there. For the first chapter in a multi-year tribute to the Deastville site, Heaven Hill chose 17 barrels, aged on the third floor of Rickhouse AA.

The main driver of this release is that Deatsville will no longer be an active aging site for the company. Heaven Hill states that “all nine Deatsville rickhouses will transition to regauge-only status over the next 12–24 months, marking the gradual aging out of the campus from active maturation.  Most barrels currently aging at Deatsville will be relocated to other Heaven Hill sites.” This location will surely be missed by Deatsville fans, as the campus is the only one Heaven Hill uses that is constructed with tiered roof architecture, which allows warm air to rise and escape while drawing cooler air inward through lower openings.

Heaven Hill Deatsville 13-Year-Old Bourbon has a classic bourbon throughline, with rich notes of aged oak, brown sugar, and spice that ground the whole sip. Its aroma comes across as older than it actually is, yet the palate and finish deliver aged flavors that never veer into over-oaked territory. The interplay between charred, aged oak and sweeter, spicier flavor notes creates a great balance, producing a sip that is instantly enjoyable.

Heaven Hill has been known to produce excellent classic Kentucky bourbon when it wants to, thanks to its 2 million-plus aging barrels it can choose from. Heaven Hill Deatsville 13-Year-Old Bourbon is certainly one of those situations, as the sip it delivers is an excellent example of what the company is capable of. This bourbon serves as a great starting point for the multi-year tribute Heaven Hill has planned, and fans of the Deatsville campus will be both pleased at what the site produced and saddened that bourbons won’t spend their entirety aging on site in the future.