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Mike...you can still find IW Harper in the Dallas area. It and Old Charter regularly show up as "premium" pours in Dallas bars catering to the whiskey drinkers there. The Whisky Bar down on lower Greenville Ave has a decent selection of bourbons including the above mentioned.
Randy B.
It looks like that 15 year old soldier served you well!
On the subject of IW Harper, we found this (tragically) empty "bottle" at a junk shop some years ago and couldn't resist purchasing it. The label declares it as "130 months old." Obviously, this is not the current incarnation of IW Harper. Did you try it, or do you know anything about it?
By the way, at the risk of being presumptuous, we would be proud to bring Mr. Cowdery a bottle of IW Harper from VA should our paths ever cross in Chicago or Kentucky. We might request the indulgence of your personal tasting notes in return, however; if nothing else, we want to know if you taste that wacky cream soda flavor finish.
Dave & Tina
I will always accept gladly and with all the grace I can muster gifts of bourbon, thank you for the offer.
I don't know anything about that particular package but at one time such special issues were pretty common.
What a disaster!
All of this talk of IW Harper has stimulated my taste buds for it. Consequently, when we made the trip to our usual VA ABC store to pick up Tina's Big EW 1783 (on sale in April as we were advised by a friendly Bourbonian http://www.straightbourbon.com/forum...lins/toast.gif), imagine my horror as Tina said, "You know, I don't see any IW Harper here." It was so. None to be found. Not even any evidence of where it SHOULD have been.
Upon inquiring, we were told that distribution had stopped about six months before and that there will be no more in VA in the foreseeable future.
Wish us luck - after trying multiple stores, we have located by phone some old stock in a small store about 40 miles away. Hopefully, our ABC civil servant will hold some for us as she promised. Tina will probably head out early this week to get it. Meanwhile, the 2 inches of IWH we have left goes into hiding.
Fellow IWH fans in VA might want to start checking around!
You don't miss your water until the well runs dry.
VERY true!
Don't worry, though. Depending on the outcome of our IWH recovery mission, this is our plan:
We'll have, at the very least, our remaining 2 inches in an appropriate container (to prevent oxidation) for the day that may come when we cross paths with Chuck Cowdery for an IW Harper bourbon tasting.
We'll keep you posted.
Well, we may have to give up. The lead we had above turned out to be false. There was in fact no IW Harper at the store, and I don't know what the clerk thought I said on the phone. A friend went to pick it up and was given three bottles of cheap blended whiskey.
We were in Hot Springs VA this weekend. Tina thought she was in luck when the guy at the ABC store said he had "three bottles left," but he returned with one bottle of the 15 year. As a consolation, he let us have it for $15. It makes me wonder if the 15 year has been pulled out of VA distribution, too.
It's long been my understanding the 15yo has been pulled out of U.S. distribution -- export only -- not just VA.
I had no idea. I just assumed that the 15 yo bottling was distributed differently. I guess we did get lucky after all, and with a price break to boot. I really like the 15 yo bottling, and I hate to think that's gone, too!
Aside: I also hate that one of the few notable American art forms - bourbon - gets uniquely bottled and packaged only to be exported.
This is a case where'll I'll be glad to be wrong, but I think it came up on another discussion (about the Bourbon Heritage Collection, of which it is part). If so, I'm sure the experts here will straighten us out.
But, if it is still distributed it begs the question: where the heck is it? I bought the only bottle I've ever seen.