Hi all,
I ducked into a random corner store in the Tenderloin in San Francisco recently and spotted, way up on a top shelf, a very old, faded looking bottle of Bourbon de Luxe. I had the guy behind the counter bring it down and looked it over. The cop was damaged but seemed intact, and the bottle certainly seemed old.
He wanted $15 for it, so I picked it up even with the old lid, as I've heard old Bourbon de Luxe from National Distiller can be interesting. I did some research online and found one particular interesting point. The field that the knight is on is gold on this particular bottle, not red. I haven't seen a single picture of a Bourbon de Luxe online that has a gold field in the logo- even going back decades it was always red. This intrigues me somewhat, and I'm wondering if this was made for export possibly. Note that there is no label on the back of the bottle at all, and it doesn't appear that there ever was. The bottom of the bottle has the numbers 11, 96, IIA 555 and BF on it. It might be that the year of bottling was 1996, which makes it a 20 year old bottle, if that's the correct way to read the bottle (I don't know myself). The label itself says 33-X100-IH on it, both on the big and the small label around the top. The aging of the label makes it appear to be at least that old. Any information would be appreciated in identifying just what the provenance of this stuff might be. I don't think its worth much but I'm interested doing a side-by-side with the modern stuff if I can pin-point the year this was made in, especially since this was made before the big bourbon vogue was even a blip. Thanks!