It's Time to Enter the 2025 Old Forester Birthday Bourbon Raffle

So what’s going on? Every year, Old Forester celebrates the birthday of its founder George Garvin Brown with a special batch of “Birthday Bourbon”. Every year, they hold a limited raffle for a limited number of bottles, and every year those bottles resell for hundreds of dollars over the MSRP.

To put the process simply, Old Forester runs the sweepstakes for three days, starting August 18 and ending August 21. Entries will not be accepted after this period. On September 2 (Brown’s birthday), 1,000 winners will be selected.

These winners are required to pick up their Birthday Bourbon in person, at Old Forester’s Kentucky distillery. You must show a valid ID that matches the name used in your entry, and you cannot have another person pick up the bourbon for you.

If you’re unable to make the trip to Kentucky, don’t enter this raffle. Old Forester will not hold a bottle for you, and your winning entry will be discarded. Additionally, you’ll still have to pay $200 for your bottle; Old Forester isn’t giving them away for free.

The bourbon itself is aged for 12 years, and this release marks the 25th occasion Old Forester has released their Birthday Bourbon. Alongside some tweaks to the formula, they’re also changing how the sweepstakes are run.

In previous years, Old Forester has held a limited public sale of their Birthday Bourbon at their distillery, but that will no longer be the case in 2025. Instead, all of the bottles produced for this batch are earmarked for sweepstakes sales.

The upside is that this gives sweepstakes’ entrants a slightly better chance of winning a bottle, although it’s a disappointment to Louisville locals that were hoping to pick up a bottle after the sweepstakes end.

Now for the fun part. Because of how these bottles’ scarcity and unique distribution, they command serious prices on the aftermarket. Old Forester Birthday Bourbon has become a staple for whiskey collectors in the last few decades.

We’ve covered both the 2023 and 2024 releases, and we’re very confident in this flip. Recent Old Forester Birthday Bourbons are currently reselling for around $1,000.

It’s easy to see the potential profits compared against the whiskey’s $200 retail price. Yes, this is a pretty niche flip that not everyone can take advantage of. Yes, the odds of winning are pretty long. Yes, you might need to make a bit of a trip to collect your bottle.

As always, we’ll let you make the decision yourself. It’s completely free to enter the raffle though, so you might as well throw your name in. One last thing, you need to be 21+ to enter and collect a bottle (obviously).

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