Pappy Van Winkle 20 Year Bourbon (Lawrenceburg Green Glass)

Among the rarest Pappy bottles around and the first of Van Winkle’s 20 year old releases. Its red foil cap and green glass suggest that he produced it in the mid to late 1990s. These early bottlings of the 20 year old are not from the wheated whiskey stocks Van Winkle sourced from Stitzel-Weller, but a high-rye bourbon that came from the Old Boone distillery. Arguably, it was this batch of whiskey that more than any other single bourbon is responsible for the Pappy craze and the bourbon boom. It was a bottle of Van Winkle’s Boone sourced bourbon that so impressed the judges at the Beverage Testing Institute, who in 1997 awarded it an astounding 99 points out of 100.