Booker’s Final Batch Of 2024 Named For A NOT Beam Master Distiller

Ever since Booker’s revamped its regular release bourbon around discrete batches, those batches have been named for various aspects of Booker Noe’s larger than life personality, legendary career or veteran employees of the Jim Beam distillery. For Booker’s fourth and final batch of 2024, Jim Beam has taken the brand steering wheel and given it a hard spin, dubbing it “Jimmy’s Batch” for Noe’s peer: Wild Turkey Master Distiller and living legend Jimmy Russell.

Booker Noe and Jimmy Russell both count among the figures who helped revive bourbon from its nadir of the 1980s, and while Noe came from a distillery-owning and -managing dynasty, Jimmy Russell wound up founding one: Russel’s son is the current Wild Turkey master distiller, and his grandson seems set to come next. While Russell’s ancestors had worked in the whiskey trade, none of them rose to the post of actually running the stillhouse.

This batch of Bookers came from 3 production runs stored in 4 different warehouses:

12% came from the 5th floor of 7-story warehouse Z
20% came from the 5th floor of 7-story warehouse 1
46% came from the 3rd floor of 7-story warehouse 3
22% came from the 4th floor of 7-story warehouse Q

The resulting batch came in at 125.8 proof and is 7 years, 9 months, and 19 days old. With that being the age of the youngest bourbon in the batch, this is pretty old Booker’s by the standards of recent years. The expression is rooted in being between 6 and 8 years of age, but for the last several years that has been closer to 7 than 8. The suggested retail price remains at $99.99 for a standard fifth bottle.