Old Forester
The highly-sought after 2025 Old Forester Birthday Bourbon has been announced with a release date of September 4th.
To be able to pick up a bottle of one of the most prized ultra-premium bourbons in the industry, bourbon lovers must first enter the Old Forester lottery. That lottery is opening today, August 18th, and will run through August 21st on OldForester.com.
For those fortunate enough to win the lottery, they must then pick up their bottle of the 2025 Old Forester Birthday Bourbon at the Old Forester distillery in Louisville on September 4th.
2025 Old Forester Birthday Bourbon
It is a 12-year-old bourbon with the liquid going into the barrels back on April 5, 2013. Somehow that doesn’t seem like all that long ago but it has all of the delicious vanilla flavoring you would expect from an older bourbon.
The 2025 Birthday Bourbon clocks in at 92-proof and was pulled from 210 barrels that aged in Old Forester‘s Warehouse K, on floors 1 and 5.
Old Forester’s official tasting notes for the 2025 Birthday Bourbon are:
Color – Honeycomb
Aroma – Notes of herbal tea and cardamom complimented by hints of raw oak as well as tropical fruits and green apple
Taste – Silky notes of oak and vanilla, balanced with sweet citrus and clove spice
Finish – candied apple and burnt sugar with leather and chai spice
You can see how the label color changes year over year. Here is the 2023 Birthday Bourbon with red on the label versus blue this year:
Old Forester / BroBible
I was fortunate enough to get an advanced pour of the 2025 Birthday Bourbon, the first time that Old Forester has used the ‘sweet mash’ process with solely freshly-propagated yeast in lieu of the ‘setback’ fermentation process of the past. And I can tell you, this year’s Birthday Bourbon is still as phenomenal as it ever was.
I shared a dram with one of my good friends who has a more refined palate than I do. His official review was “Herbal nose, spice up front and on the tongue, punchy for 92! Sneaky cherry on the finish. Medium round body. Dry nutty finish.”
I was getting a lot of the vanilla up front and definitely some notes of cherry on the finish. I was looking for that green apple on the nose and only found it in trace amounts but did get notes of sticky banana and what I thought was a little guanabana fruit.
What makes this so special?
The annual Birthday Bourbon release from Old Forester is a 12-year ultra-premium bourbon. They have been putting it out every year since 2002 and earned a reputation for one of the best bourbons on earth.
Each birthday bourbon release is from a one-day distillation batch. In layman’s terms, all of the bourbon was made on the same day and not over a week or month.
Each year’s release has a distinct flavor profile but one thing remains constant: quality. The 2025 Old Forester Birthday Bourbon blew me away last weekend.
It will be difficult to find if you do not win the lottery! It always is. So be prepared to enter that lottery on Old Forester’s website and hope for the best.