Two Decades of Henry McKenna Bottled in Bond; Or, How Not to Do a Whiskey Tasting

For a long time, Henry McKenna Bottled in Bond has been a bourbon that flew under the radar of casual whiskey drinkers. That might be changing due to the fact that it just won bourbon of the year at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and there are now reports of people clearing the shelves (which is incredibly stupid) but that's not what we are here to talk about.

On paper, everything about Henry McKenna is great. It's a bargain at around $30, bottled at a respectable 100 proof, carries an age statement of 10 years (something that is more and more rare these days), and it's readily available. Heaven Hill has earned a solid reputation for making good bourbon and McKenna lives up to that standard, it's a solid daily driver / house bourbon material.

My real fixation with McKenna started though when a friendly redditor sent me a sample from the very first barrel of Henry McKenna ever dumped. Barrel 001 distilled on December 14th 1984 and bottled in December of 1994 making it "pre-fire" which means it was distilled at Heaven Hill's Bardstown Kentucky distillery before it was destroyed by a 1996 fire. I was floored by how good it was and to this day it remains one of the best bourbons I've ever had. All you have to do is look at the color side by side with a current bottling to know there was something magical going on back then. My curiosity had been piqued to the point that I sought out more samples, all of which were distilled on the same day. While they were all very good, the results were mixed - the 84-94 Barrel 008 wasn't nearly as good as the first barrel and the 84-94 Barrel 016 was somewhere between the two.

This got me wondering just how much variance there was in McKenna over the years so I went on a mission to seek out as many bottles or samples as I could. I had initially just planned to do reviews of each of them but along the way, my friend Alex G. and I got the idea to do one massive blind tasting of all of them to see how or if McKenna had changed since its introduction in the mid-90's. So, I headed over to his place one night, the samples were randomized, and we dove in. The candidates were:

Barrel	Distilled	Pre-Fire	Source
#0016	12/14/84	✅	Alex G.
#0083	12/05/86	✅
#0141	11/27/89	✅
#0208	05/01/92	✅
#0232	04/19/93	✅
#0324	05/09/95	✅
#0328	05/20/96	✅
#0372	05/27/97	❌	/u/VulgarDisplayOfStuff
#0727	04/05/01	❌	Adam I.
#0797	09/28/01	❌	/u/Rev_Lijah
#0842	10/24/01	❌	/u/brettatlas
#1282	04/10/03	❌	/u/mikeczyz
#1508	05/04/04	❌	@bourbonooga
#3035	03/14/06	❌

And the results?

Well, here's the thing. A lot of these were so close in core profile it was really hard to distinguish differences in quality between them. Both of us ended up having to do a lot of tasting to hone in on the standouts. Combine that with the sheer number of samples involved, and well, we (unintentionally) got drunk. In the end, my notes were more or less garbage and I wasn't sure they accurately reflected the rankings. 

In hindsight, this was a terrible idea. I've done plenty of tastings before, some of which have involved lots of samples - like back when Four Roses would roll out 10 barrels or when Alex and I did a Russell's Reserve pick at Wild Turkey and Eddie insisted that we try every barrel. Both of those experiences were a slog - yet each was somehow easier than this night.

As useless as they are, my rankings for the night were in groups. On top:

#0328 (05/20/96), #0208 (05/01/92), #0141 (11/27/89)

Those were pretty close with #0328 being the standout. The next group was:

#0016 (12/14/84), #0083 (12/05/86), #0372 (05/27/97)

Everything beyond that was a wash except #3035 which was a clear last place by quite a margin. It is telling that the newest bottling finished last for both of us and that my top 6 was all pre-fire barrels so there seems to be a correlation of age to quality if you want to trust these results.

Final Thoughts

Don't ever try to do a tasting like this if you want accurate results. Instead, I'd recommend breaking this many candidates down into groups of four or at most six, playoff bracket style. As a penance, over the coming weeks, I plan to do a normal review of each of the bottles I have remaining to try and salvage some dignity here.

Thanks to Alex for helping source these as well as hosting the tasting and to all those who provided samples to make this happen.