The Gospel According to Elijah: Bourbon, Redemption, and the Australian Twist.

Whiskey history has always loved its saints. Every dram, it seems, needs its prophet. Somewhere in the collective imagination sits Elijah Craig, the 18th-century Baptist preacher who supposedly looked at a pile of scorched oak barrels and thought, “why not?” Legend has it that sometime in 1789, he rolled a batch of raw corn spirit into freshly charred oak and, almost by accident or divine mischief, turned rough frontier liquor into liquid amber - the first whisper of what would become bourbon. It’s a tidy myth, ready-made for a label. But, like most things in early America, the truth is stickier.

Craig was not simply a devout man of the cloth who moonlighted as a distiller. He was also an enslaver. His success, and the economic foundation of early bourbon-making, rested on the skill, innovation, and back-breaking labor of enslaved African Americans. For generations, whiskey brands were happy to omit that footnote. The industry liked its founders uncomplicated and its timelines clean, preferring nostalgia over nuance.

Elijah Craig today is rewriting its own gospel.

In collaboration with the University of Kentucky’s Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies and the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative, the brand is researching and publicly acknowledging the lives of those whose work underpinned bourbon’s earliest chapters. This isn’t a hollow exercise in brand contrition. It’s a slow unearthing of the human hands that literally built the barrels and stoked the fires that shaped America’s native spirit. For once, the narrative of bourbon is expanding beyond the myth of lone genius and into something closer to truth.

When divine inspiration meets a barrel of bad decisions - and somehow invents bourbon.

It’s a brave move, especially in a category still wrapped in heritage theatre. Whiskey brands have spent decades selling history as comfort - men in waistcoats, oak barns, and sepia-tinted righteousness. But bourbon’s real story has always been one of collision: between faith and profit, invention and exploitation, fire and water. Elijah Craig’s reckoning with that history isn’t about rebranding. It’s about realizing that authenticity isn’t found in a slogan, it’s distilled in transparency.

Transparency, as it happens, is something Elijah Craig knows how to bottle. The Small Batch opens like a sermon in slow motion. A glow of baked apple and wildflower honey gives way to a flash of mint - Kentucky’s limestone-filtered water leaving its signature. Then comes the hum of leather, tobacco, and charred oak, the sensory equivalent of an old hymn sung in a warm church. The first sip is gentle, like honey soaking into cornbread, before nutmeg, clove, and toasted almond rise in rhythm. The Level 3 char does its work with quiet authority: caramelized wood sugars and a trace of campfire smoke that drifts just long enough to suggest memory, not affectation.

This is bourbon that converses rather than performs. It doesn’t demand reverence; it earns it through balance. Each layer - sweet, spice, smoke - unfolds at its own tempo. You can taste the chemistry and the climate, Kentucky’s extremes pressing the spirit deep into the wood and drawing it back out again.

And now, that equilibrium has found a new audience. For the first time in its history, Heaven Hill Distillery has released a 40% ABV Elijah Craig Small Batch, crafted exclusively for Australia. It’s an unprecedented move for a brand that has built its reputation on proof and patience. Yet it makes sense. Australian drinkers are leaning into bourbon with curiosity rather than bravado, and this lighter expression meets them there - versatile, smooth, and ready to take a highball or an Old Fashioned without losing its soul.

Grant Shearon, Heaven Hill’s APAC Brand Ambassador, calls it “bourbon for today’s drinkers.” But what he’s really describing is a cultural shift. Australia’s spirits scene is moving away from imported imitation toward identity. With rising excise rates pushing distillers and drinkers alike toward flexibility, the 40% Elijah Craig feels less like compromise and more like adaptation - bourbon meeting climate, culture, and economics halfway.

It’s also a subtle reminder that reinvention has always been baked into bourbon’s DNA. From colonial resourcefulness to post-Prohibition revival to the global whiskey renaissance, the drink has thrived by learning how to start again. Even the cocktail canon, now revived with modern reverence, began as a series of practical tweaks. Elijah Craig’s “Old Fashioned” remains its spiritual anchor: 60ml bourbon, simple syrup, bitters, and orange peel - stirred, not fussed over. Its sibling, the “Revolver,” gives the Manhattan an Antipodean edge with wattleseed and coffee liqueur, a small rebellion in a coupe glass.

So yes, Elijah Craig might still trade on the “Father of Bourbon” title, but the brand’s current evolution feels less paternal and more confessional. It’s about acknowledging the layered, uncomfortable beauty of its past and the shared creativity of its future. In that sense, the new Australian Small Batch isn’t just a marketing experiment - it’s part of bourbon’s global second act, one where geography, history, and taste finally sit at the same table.

What lingers, long after the glass is empty, is warmth. Not the heavy burn of nostalgia, but the kind that comes from honesty well told. Elijah Craig isn’t preaching anymore. It’s listening, learning, and pouring that reflection into the glass.

Elijah Craig Small Batch 40% is available now through Dan Murphy’s at $79.99. It’s bourbon with a conscience, a lighter body, and just enough wit to remind you that good spirits, like good stories, only get better when you stop pretending they were simple to begin with.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Elijah Craig.