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A 1916 vintage expression of Kentucky whiskey bottled in bond at 50% Abv in 1934. This hyper rare expression was produced using whiskey from H.S. Barton distillery and bottled under the legendary Old Rip Van Winkle brand.

H.S. Barton was the manager at RD#24, better known as the Glenmore Distilling Company. This distillery was built in 1869 by Richard Monarch in Owensboro Kentucky. When Monarch died in 1890, James Thompson purchased the Glenmore distillery. The site burned down in 1893, being rebuilt in 1895. Thompson operated the distillery until prohibition, but was one of the few firms to be granted a license to bottle whiskey.

Many of the barrels bottled during this time bear the H.S. Barton moniker, but correlate to the RD#24 which is Glenmore. This is one such bottling and was distilled in 1916 whilst the company was still under the ownership of James Thompson and management of H.S Barton.

This pint sized bottling does not note the firm who bottled it, but the bonded warehouse in Missouri where this is noted to have been bottled was transacted by the Sunny Brook Distillery Co in 1904, a firm that would be absorbed into the American Medicinal Spirits Co in 1933. Thus it is likely the American Medicinal Spirits Co held bottled this medicinal pint at this Missouri warehouse, and were therefore the owners of the brand before it was used by the Stitzel-Weller firm. Old Rip Van Winkle was 1st introduced in 1919, however evidence as to who was bottling at this time is thin, but it appears it may have been a brand from Sunny Brook Co.

The name refers to a character from the book Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their strong liquor and falls deeply asleep in the Catskill Mountains. He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.

The Stitzel-Weller distillery would ultimately revive the Old Rip Van Winkle label in the 20th century. However this spirit was bottled using wheated bourbon, a very different recipe to the original H.S. Barton sourced liquid.