American whiskey is in trouble, seemingly according to everyone. Distilleries have slowed production, others are closing and sales have dropped because of a combination of factors: an abstemious younger generation of legal drinkers, the impact of tariffs, rising fuel costs, inflation and GLP-1s, among other things.
Heaven Hill has faced a tumultuous market many times before. Late last year (December 13, to be exact) marked the 90th anniversary the Bardstown, KY, whiskey makers first distilled bourbon at Heaven Hill Springs Distillery. The company had no inventory when they started in 1935, only a few years after the American whiskey industry was all but destroyed by Prohibition and in the midst of the Great Depression. In 1996, a distillery fire burned down the original facility, seven warehouses and swallowed 90,000 barrels of whiskey (miraculously, there were no fatalities). That devastating event forced them to find a new distillery, which shifted production to Bernheim in Louisville, KY. In-between, they weathered the vodka craze that temporarily put American whiskey on the bottom shelf.
Times are weird again, to be sure. But Heaven Hill is undeniably thriving.
Ninety years after the company was founded by brothers Mose, George, David, Gary and Ed Shapira — one of the first Jewish families to settle in Bardstown in the early 20th century — Heaven Hill (named for landowner William Heavenhill) is still independently owned by that family. As Max, the son of Ed, who serves as executive chairman (his daughter Kate Latts is co-president), recently told me over Zoom, “We get the headwinds. But as an independently-owned and family-led company, we continue to make investments in the long term.”
One key example: the 1999 acquisition of the storied Kentucky bourbon brand Old Fitzgerald, originally produced at Stitzel Weller distillery by Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle post-Prohibition. Now produced at the company’s Bernheim distillery in Louisville, the bottled-in-bond wheated bourbon (the mash bill consists of 68% corn, 20% wheat and 12% malted barley) is typically sold in a fetching retro decanter with low-volume limited editions each spring and fall. These are typically higher age statement releases, upwards of 10 years, that continue to sell out quickly with a price tag in the low hundreds. In 2025, they released a 7-Year variation in a slimmer decanter for an average of $70. Even in this economy, bourbon drinkers were thirsty for it, and allocations became necessary. More is set to hit shelves later this year.
This American Whiskey Collection Just Set a Record at Auction
The Great American Whiskey Collection featured some very rare bottlesWhen Master Distiller Conor O’Driscoll started at Heaven Hill in 2019, the bourbon industry was in what has been described as “maintenance mode” as distilleries struggled to keep up with demand. “The facetious line I used to use is that my orders from Max were to make all the whiskey I can and then make a little bit more,” O’Driscoll says.
Obviously, despite the popularity of products like that Old Fitzgerald 7-Year-Old Bottled-in-Bond — which O’Driscoll refers to as the wheated “sister bourbon” to the classic Heaven Hill 7-Year-Old — things are different now. “The industry is going through whatever it’s going through. But we opened Heaven Hill Springs Distillery last year as a way of getting ahead for the future,” says O’Driscoll, referring to the new state-of-the-art, sustainability-focused distillery in Bardstown. He sees the $200 million investment as a necessary one that will pay off with time, patience and a steady output of bourbon maturing in barrels while the drinks world sorts itself out.
O’Driscoll, a Dublin native with a chemical engineering background, arrived at Heaven Hill with 17 years of experience at Brown-Forman and a shorter stint at Angel’s Envy. He went from managing thousands of barrels to well over a million (there are now more than two million barrels resting between the facilities). “I’ve worked in small, medium, large and now extra large distilleries,” he says. “At first I was like, ‘Holy crap, this thing is big.’ The fermenters are 124,000 gallons. There are 17 of them. We make 1,500 barrels a day.”
While the industry glut is no joke, he says it allows them to balance the inventory between the array of labels under the Heaven Hill umbrella, which along with the Old Fitz line includes Heaven Hill label bourbons, Elijah Craig (both bourbon and rye), Evan Williams, Henry McKenna, Bernheim wheat whiskey (which recently started releasing limited-edition barrel-proof expressions), Rittenhouse rye, Larceny and that very specific throwback fan favorite, Mellow Corn (O’Driscoll says it’s his not-so-guilty pleasure, served Paloma-style in summer).
Meanwhile, Max Shapira and the HH team are gearing up for the Whiskey & Whisky auction at Sotheby’s on June 11, when three ultra-rare library bottles of Old Fitzgerald will be on sale. These include a Bottled-in-Bond expression from 1934, Very Extra Old from 1965 (distilled in 1955) and a one-of-a-kind 20-Year decanter from 2015. In September 2025, a bottle of Very Very Old Fitzgerald 18-Year-Old “Blackhawk” from 1950 sold for a reported $106,250, so expectations are high. Proceeds from the June auction will benefit the Bernheim Foundation, a nonprofit established in the 1920s by Isaac W. Bernheim — founder of the Bernheim distillery now used by Heaven Hill — to protect more than 17,000 acres of Kentucky forest land.
As for the day-to-day, Shapira doesn’t seem at all worried. “We’ve seen markets like this on any number of occasions,” he says. “We’ve just got to have patience and perseverance. Because we can row our own boat [as an independent entity], we’re able to look at this business in the long term. This business is about our people, who they are, what they do and the passion everyone at Heaven Hill brings to their individual job every single day.”
For all the talk about the bourbon industry — and mind you, these are real problems — as there were with older generations during the rum and cola days of the 1970s and ‘80s, there will always be generations of people who appreciate great whiskey. The others just need to catch up.
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