Old Forester Signature Review

Outside of their limited edition Birthday Bourbon, I don’t have a lot of experience with Old Forester products. Given that the Birthday Bourbon is supposed to be the flagship of the line and I don’t particularly care for it, I’ve never really felt much need to explore the rest of their products. However, in an effort to cover all of the major distilleries in our community reviews over on /r/bourbon, Old Forester Signature was chosen as the representative of the brand for our next group review so I was obligated to give it a shot. While this isn’t supposed to be a particularly hard to find Bourbon, I actually had some difficulty in sourcing a bottle. I had to call at least a dozen stores that had other items such as the 86 proof Old Forester and newer 1870 releases before I was able to track down a bottle of this. I suspect it’s just not a popular product here so most of my local stores don’t carry it. As best I can tell there isn’t much interesting backstory behind this bottle, it’s just plain old no frills Bourbon which is kind of welcoming.

No Age Statement; 50% ABV; $23

Nose: The nose is mostly oak and caramel/vanilla wood sugars with a little banana taffy which is an indicator of slight youngness to me.

Taste: The upfront taste is like the nose with more wood and some burnt caramel. The sweet taffy is still present initially but soon fades behind darker, more complex oak notes. The mid palate starts to bring on some acidic citrus zip that eventually leads to a spicy rye finish. Along with the spice at the end there are some nice dark chocolate and green apple flavors.

Thoughts: I expected to hate this given my opinion of Birthday Bourbon but I was pleasantly surprised. This reminds me a lot of Heaven Hill’s 6 year Bottled in Bond that I reviewed a while back. I think they share a lot of similarities as they are both a mid-level rye Bourbons and I would guess the Signature is a blend of aged whiskey that averages out to about the same 6 year age or a little less. There isn’t really anything standout here but there’s also nothing to complain about. It’s just a standard, classic Bourbon at a nice proof and even better it comes at an affordable price. Outside of Bottled in Bond Bourbons that are hard to find in a lot of markets, I can’t think of many bottles that are better than this one at this price point.

Rating: B-