I've Tried Hundreds of Whiskeys. This Cheap Bourbon Is Better Than Competitors Three Times Its Cost
Old Grand-Dad Bonded is one of my favorite bargain bourbons for a variety of reasons besides its $25-per-liter price point at stores around me. My appreciation revolves around the name’s reference, how the brand was almost lost, and its flavorful high rye mash bill.
The brand was created in 1882 by Raymond Hayden, named in tribute to his grandfather and distiller Basil Hayden Sr. Basil’s portrait still appears on every bottle of Old Grand-Dad (though it's a more serious sketch on today’s bottles rather than the more jovial one on bottles past). Despite various changes of packaging and distilling locations, the brand has stayed true to a high rye profile at 27 percent of the mash bill. The extra rye pays dividends in a spice complexity that includes white pepper and cinnamon notes.
The brand changed hands through the years, including a Prohibition bypass with the American Medicinal Spirits Company that later led it to be produced by National Distillers. What Prohibition didn't kill, the disco drinks of the 1980s almost did, as bourbon sales were in major decline.
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DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps was one of the rising stars during that decade—so much so that it had a major cameo in the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail. It also played a central role in my first drinking escapade. For my birthday, my older coworkers wanted to impart some worldly knowledge before I started college less than a month later. We mixed the schapps with orange juice to make Fuzzy Navels.
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Perhaps to balance out its own lagging American whiskey sales, Beam bought that DeKuyper line in 1987 for $545 million. The deal also came with a handful of National Distillers’ whiskeys that were waning in popularity, like Old Taylor, Old Crow, Old Overholt, and Old Grand-Dad. In a sugary, colorful, and playful era, it's unclear if the whiskey labels sweetened the deal or unloaded unwanted baggage.
Beam shed some of the brands like Old Taylor in a sale to the Sazerac Company and mothballed others like Sunny Brook. However, the company saw value in Old Grand-Dad and decided to keep the brand and original recipe alive.
The recipe part is important to the flavor aspect, but sadly that treatment wasn't universal. Old Crow, for example, was converted to the same recipe and process as the normal Jim Beam White Label Bourbon offering but bottled younger. Having recently tried Old Grand-Dad Bonded that was distilled in 1951 and bottled in 1956, the whiskey isn't the same. The older is more caramel and butterscotch-driven, with other flavor variations that can be attributed to variances in yeast strain, distillation, and aging techniques. However, in modern bottles, the core of the flavor is still there, as well as the tradition and quality.
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As bourbon prices have risen astronomically, Old Grand-Dad Bonded has only crept up gradually with inflation and costs me merely 75 cents per ounce. The quality-to-price ratio has made it popular with bartenders and price conscious whiskey drinkers, especially as the Wellers and Blanton's of the world have more than doubled in price over the last 15 years. And for fans of high rye bourbons, Old Grand-Dad Bonded is one-third cheaper than Bulleit Bourbon, which has a similar grain build.
Old Grand-Dad is currently produced at three strengths of 80, 100, and 114 proof, and like the Goldilocks tale, the first falls a bit flabby and the third hits a bit hot for me. The 114 proof does play a role in punching down sweeter ingredients in cocktails such as amaro and other liqueurs in the mix, but the extra proof makes it less enjoyable to my palate as a sipper.
Additionally, Old Grand-Dad Bonded has to follow certain requirements to be labeled as such. Bonded whiskeys are aged at least four years and proofed to 100, which is a historical signifier of purity. Given the price and quality, I find myself enjoying this whiskey neat at night at home, as a boilermaker with an amber malt-forward beer pairing at bars, or as an old fashioned in casual moments like cooking dinner when neat spirits would make my empty stomach angry. Certainly, I have finer bourbons on my shelves, but it has been getting harder to justify them price wise for anything other than special moment pours, so having Old Grand-Dad Bonded on hand is truly a blessing.