Dusties — old bottles of whiskey that haven’t been in production for years but still taste delicious — are cool as hell. Look into them yourself and you’ll quickly see why. Old whiskey lasts forever in an unopened bottle, and lots of the old stuff before the Bourbon Boom really was delicious. Here is a history lesson in your mouth, that usually cost half what the good stuff does today (and rarer, too). Once the last bottle of a discontinued whiskey is drunk, it’s gone.
This might make you start thinking about what other bottles you’re going to miss when they’re gone, or ones that will become prohibitively expensive and stripped from shelves. In the bourbon world, whiskey perceived as good quickly becomes too good. People start making noise about some delicious bottle (or Jim Murray writes about it), and suddenly everybody wants it. Bourbon drinking and fandom rolls on, and every day one new good bottle creeps toward becoming overhyped, overdrank, the market drained dry of it.
It’s enough to make you a little anxious, isn’t it? It also makes you wonder what good stuff is out there that you can get now, before the horde buys it all up. We asked a trio of experts which bottles they’re stocking up on before it’s too late. Here are the bottles you’ll wish you’d bought ten years from now.
Four Roses
A Whiskey in Transition:“I would put a lot of time into Four Roses,” says Fred Minnick, the Editor-in-Chief of Bourbon+ magazine. When looking for “the next big thing,” he considers whiskey that’s had a transition. Hence Four Roses, which changed master distillers from Jim Rutledge to Brent Elliott in 2015. “The whiskey coming out of them is amazing right now,” Minnick says. “The style is so different than when Rutledge was there. They’re both amazing whiskeys. I love the differences between the two.”
