This Forgotten Liquor Era Produced Some Of Bourbon's Best Bottles

Ask anyone what their favorite bourbon is and the responses are likely to range from Maker's Mark and Bulleit to Woodford Reserve and Angel's Envy. After all, they consistently rank high in lists featuring America's best-selling bourbons. When it comes to quality, our ranking of the 30 best bourbon brands on the market today featured Eagle Rare, Old Rip Van Winkle, and Stagg at the top. But, as it turns out, some of the best bourbon bottles were produced during an otherwise forgotten period in alcohol history — the glut era of the 1970s to 1990s.

Within the alcohol industry, the 1970s and decade or so onward are often called the "glut era," as whiskey consumption had already peaked before, and entered a steady decline through those decades. Between the Hippies shunning and Boomers either shunning booze altogether or discovering a taste for clear spirits like vodka and tequila, no one was drinking bourbon anymore. But, as it turns out, this was a blessing in disguise. As one bar owner and whiskey connoisseur put it, bourbon from this decade "benefited from neglect." 

Bourbon is a type of American whiskey made by mashing corn, rye, and malted barley before boiling, fermenting, distilling, and ageing them in charred oak barrels for anything between two to eight years. As consumption of whiskey dropped in the '70s, well-aged barrels of bourbon sat neglected in cellars and shelves across the country. The longer they sat, the better they got, with time smoothening out rough edges and adding deeper, more layered notes and a velvety mouthfeel to the bourbon. Which explains why some of the best bourbon comes from a time when people had stopped drinking bourbon.

Finding a barrel of bourbon lying unattended for nearly half a century might be hard. What you could do instead is get your hands on a bottle of "dusty bourbon" — a term whiskey aficionados use to describe an old bottle, or something that's been gathering dust. Dusty bourbons work on the same principle as glut-era bourbon, with the difference being they don't need to be specifically from the time period. What qualifies as "dusty" is highly subjective. While anything over 10 years could qualify, seasoned dusty hunters would probably not give a second look at anything other than Stitzel-Weller bottled between 1950 and 1980, or Wild Turkey from the 1970s and 1980s.

There are subtle changes in flavor from one decade to another, even if production steps have remained the same. From the quality of the corn used (heirloom, hybrid, GMO), the type of yeast, climate change, and the changes in the quality of oak used for the barrels over time, all of this can make an impact on the flavor of the alcohol.

There's another reason some of these bottles taste better — even if they weren't from the glut era. There was a time not so long ago where the age of a bourbon didn't matter, and terms like "single-barrel" didn't mean anything to the public. This often meant better quality across the board. A Redditor breaks it down: "The best barrels were not drawn out to make ultra-premium SKUs. For instance, Buffalo Trace Antique Collection started in 2000, this means that before 2000, the best barrels Buffalo Trace made was blended into their standard product offerings."