Old Forester is releasing its next President's Choice Single Barrel series on June 13, timed to National Bourbon Day and the eighth anniversary of its Louisville Main Street distillery. The drop includes both a Bourbon and a Rye expression, each retailing at $225 in limited nationwide quantities. For on-premise buyers, this is less a product announcement than a procurement timing signal — allocations at this price tier move fast, and buyers who are not already in conversation with their distributor rep by now are likely looking at secondary-market pricing or empty shelves.
President's Choice is not a new vehicle for Old Forester, but the Rye expression returning for a second consecutive year marks a deliberate shift. Single-barrel rye whiskey at the $200-plus price point has found durable on-premise demand, particularly in craft cocktail programs and whiskey-forward bar concepts where margin-per-pour on premium pours outperforms well and call tiers. The $225 price point also positions these bottles squarely in the gift and collector segment, which continues to drive a measurable share of spirits revenue through the holiday and anniversary occasion cycle.
From a brand-launch and retail-readiness standpoint, the anniversary angle is worth studying. Old Forester is pairing a limited release with an institutional milestone — the distillery's eighth year on Main Street — creating a narrative layer that supports press placement, influencer coordination, and in-store point-of-sale without requiring a separate campaign budget. Operators running their own anniversary programming or brand partnerships should note how effectively a timed scarcity drop functions as earned-media infrastructure. Food & Beverage Magazine has tracked this mechanic repeatedly across the bourbon category as brands seek low-cost amplification for prestige SKUs.
For spirits-focused operators — hotel bars, steakhouses, independent whiskey programs — the procurement intelligence here is straightforward: President's Choice allocations are distributor-controlled, limited in quantity, and unlikely to be replenished mid-cycle. If your program uses allocated bourbon as a menu anchor or high-margin upsell, build a reorder trigger into your inventory workflow now rather than after the initial allocation lands. On the retail side, accounts that can merchandise both expressions together have a stronger story for gift buyers than those carrying only one. The dual-expression release also gives buyers a narrative reason to feature the line during the June whiskey occasion window and carry momentum into Q3 gifting pre-season.
The broader signal for the category is that premium and ultra-premium bourbon releases are increasingly structured around cultural calendar moments rather than traditional sell-in cycles. Operators who align their purchasing cadence, menu updates, and social programming to those same moments — National Bourbon Day, distillery anniversaries, harvest releases — capture a share of ambient consumer attention that broad-market SKUs simply cannot.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
