After More Than 20 Years, Stitzel-Weller to Resume Production

Earlier today, John Hansell reported on the Whisky Advocate Blog that Diageo sources have told him Stitzel-Weller will resume production soon. No further details are available. Hansell received the news in confidence several months ago, and decided to confirm it today after the news began to leak over the weekend. According to one report, on Friday night a Diageo rep spoke about it freely at Bourbon's Bistro in Louisville.

Stitzel-Weller is the Louisville distillery established by the Van Winkle family after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. It was known for producing wheated bourbon, which it sold as Old Fitzgerald, W. L. Weller and several other brands. The Van Winkle family sold the distillery, its whiskey stocks and brands in 1972. After that, ownership changed several times until it landed with a predecessor company to Diageo, which closed it in 1992. Since then, the warehouses have been used but not the distillery. There have been multiple reports that the need for asbestos abatement makes it cost prohibitive to return the existing distillery to production. How that will be resolved remains unknown.

In 1999, Diageo sold Old Fitzgerald and the other Stitzel-Weller brands.

When the Van Winkle family sold Stitzel-Weller, they retained rights to Van Winkle as a brand name and went into business as a non-distiller producer, using whiskey bought from their family's former plant. This is the basis of the now famous Pappy Van Winkle line, although today only the 23-year-old is entirely Stitzel-Weller bourbon. In other forms too, whiskey produced at Stitzel-Weller has long been highly prized but, after more than 20 years, it is very scarce.

Diageo's only active whiskey distillery in the United States is the George Dickel Distillery in Tullahoma, Tennessee. In 2012, Dickel Master Distiller John Lunn was put in charge of operations at Stitzel-Weller, where whiskey for Diageo brands is matured and blended.

We await an official announcement from Diageo as well as meaningful details. Whatever the plan, it will be several years before new Stitzel-Weller whiskey will be ready to sell.

In recent years, Diageo has prepared Stitzel-Weller to serve as a homeplace for Diageo's Bulleit brand, which is made elsewhere at non-Diageo facilities. Although The Bulleit Bourbon Experience has been ready for nearly two years, it hasn't been opened to the public. Presumably that too is imminent, but again there is no official word.

New Larceny Bourbon Is A Mystery Times Two.

These are the labels for a new bourbon from Heaven Hill. The story they tell is true. It was revealed in a book published in 1999. It is about John E. Fitzgerald, the man after whom the Old Fitzgerald brand was named.

The Old Fitzgerald brand was created by Charles Herbst, a pre-Prohibition wine and spirits wholesaler, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was made at a distillery Herbst owned near Frankfort, Kentucky, called Old Judge (now long gone).

When Herbst created the brand he made up a story to go with it, that Fitzgerald was a distiller in Frankfort who, starting in 1870, made a fine bourbon whiskey that he sold only to railroads, steamship lines, and private clubs.

It was all fiction, but Fitzgerald was a real person, a U.S. Treasury agent. Treasury agents in those days, and up until the early 1980s, controlled access to all whiskey warehouses, the better to ensure that all taxes were paid and all whiskey was made to government standards. This made the local 'government man' very powerful and there was little a distiller or distillery owner like Herbst could do if the agent assigned to his distillery helped himself to a taste now and then.

Fitzgerald had a reputation among the Herbst folks for being a particularly good judge of whiskey. The barrels that received most of his attention almost always turned out to be exemplary, and it became an inside joke to refer to a particularly good barrel of bourbon as 'a Fitzgerald.' The joke was immortalized when they chose John E. Fitzgerald as the fictional producer of a brand they called Old Fitzgerald.

No one knew the true story until author Sally Van Winkle Campbell and her historian consultant, Sam Thomas, uncovered it. Campbell is the granddaughter of Julian 'Pappy' Van Winkle, who acquired the Old Fitzgerald brand from Herbst during Prohibition.

The label above was discovered through a different kind of sleuthing. It didn't come from Heaven Hill, which owns the Fitzgerald brand today. Instead it was discovered by a COLA troller. COLA stands for "Certificate of Label Approval." All alcoholic beverage labels have to be submitted to the Treasury Department's Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for approval, and when approved they become matters of public record and are posted on the TTB's web site.

COLA Trollers are enthusiasts who search the TTB web site for clues about new products. Label approval doesn't necessarily mean a product is imminent, or that it will be released at all, but they can be tantalizing, as this one is.