Penelope Bourbon has never been particularly shy about pushing into new territory, but the brand's latest move lands squarely at the intersection of two trends reshaping the American whiskey market: the enduring, almost mythological prestige of the Old Fashioned, and the explosive consumer appetite for premium, spirits-based ready-to-pour cocktails. On May 28, 2026, the brand announced the Blackberry Old Fashioned, the newest addition to its collection of award-winning ready-to-pour cocktails. It's a calculated, confident step forward from a label that has spent the better part of eight years building a reputation for accessibility without sacrificing craft.
What's in the Bottle
The details matter here, because in a category crowded with shortcuts and artificially sweetened shortcuts masquerading as cocktails, Penelope is making a genuine case for ingredient quality. The Blackberry Old Fashioned features a blend of straight bourbon and rye whiskey, orange bitters, and blackberry simple syrup for a vibrant, fruit-forward take on the classic cocktail. That's a foundation any bartender would recognize — no filler, no mystery modifiers, just a clean build that respects the original template while finding genuine room for something new.
The bourbon-rye split is the backbone. Penelope has long used this combination across its ready-to-pour lineup, and for good reason: the rye delivers peppery structure and a dry spine that keeps the sweetness of any fruit addition from tipping into cloying territory. The orange bitters, meanwhile, aren't decorative — they bridge the botanical gap between citrus and stone fruit in a way that a cherry or simple sugar garnish alone never could. Official tasting notes from the brand describe bright berry notes balanced with layers of vanilla, oak, citrus, and warm spice. That oak and vanilla presence is the direct result of using actual aged straight whiskey rather than a neutral spirit base — a distinction worth noting for skeptics of the category.
The cocktail blends straight bourbon and rye whiskey with orange bitters and blackberry simple syrup, bottled at 76 proof and designed to be served over ice. At 76 proof — 38% ABV — the Blackberry Old Fashioned sits just below its predecessor the Peach Old Fashioned, which launched at 80 proof, and matches the Black Walnut Old Fashioned's bottling strength. It's a proof point that signals seriousness: this isn't a diluted, session-friendly pour. It's a full-strength cocktail built to land on the palate the way a properly batched barroom Old Fashioned should.
The Founders Speak: Craft Philosophy in a Convenient Format
Danny Polise, who has served as Penelope's Master Blender since the label's inception, is direct about what the release is meant to accomplish. "An Old Fashioned is one of those cocktails people already know and love, so we wanted to put our own spin on it in a way that still felt approachable and true to Penelope," said Polise. "The blackberry brings a fresh and familiar layer without taking away from the bourbon and rye at the core. You still get that classic foundation with a little something unexpected. It's balanced, easy to drink, and keeps the focus on the whiskey."
That phrase — "keeps the focus on the whiskey" — is doing real work in the context of the ready-to-pour category. The knock on many premixed cocktails, even the better-funded ones, is that the spirit becomes an afterthought, a vehicle for sweetness or novelty rather than a genuine flavor contributor. Polise is making a structural argument: the blend he and Paladini selected was built specifically to anchor the blackberry rather than be overwhelmed by it. The bourbon's vanilla and oak notes and the rye's spice create a counterweight that keeps the fruit in its place.
Michael Paladini, Penelope's co-founder and Vice President of Strategy, frames the release through the lens of a clear consumer trend rather than an isolated brand decision. "We're continuing to see consumers gravitate toward elevated ready-to-pour cocktails that deliver on both quality and convenience," said Paladini. That's not promotional fluff — it maps directly onto what the data shows is happening across the entire American spirits market right now.
The RTD Wave — and Why Penelope Is Riding It Intelligently
The numbers behind the ready-to-drink cocktail category are difficult to overstate. Premixed cocktails, including spirits RTDs, achieved sales of $3.8 billion in 2025, up 16.4% in the year, and spirits RTDs have more than doubled their market share since 2021, gaining 11 percentage points in market share in 2025. This happened while malt-based seltzers — the white claw generation's drink of choice — lost 14 points of share over the same period. The consumer pivot is real, documented, and accelerating.
On the broader growth trajectory, ready-to-drink cocktails in the U.S. are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.3% from 2025 to 2030, fueled by a desire for convenience and the increasing popularity of premium, flavorful alcoholic beverages. The premium tier, where Penelope operates, is even hotter. The spirit-based RTD cocktails market is anticipated to witness a growth rate of 20.5% from 2026 to 2033, fueled by a desire for premium offerings that connect identifiable, trusted spirits brands to a frictionless drinking experience.
The structural driver here isn't laziness — it's occasion-matching. RTD cocktails offer a hassle-free alternative to traditional cocktail preparation, eliminating the need for multiple ingredients and mixing equipment, and this convenience is particularly appealing for outdoor activities, social gatherings, and at-home consumption. A properly made Old Fashioned — even a modest one — requires whiskey, sweetener, bitters, citrus, and ideally a large-format ice cube. Getting all of those ingredients right, in the right proportions, on a Saturday afternoon at a tailgate or a rooftop deck isn't trivial. A ready-to-pour format that actually delivers on the flavor promise of that cocktail represents genuine value.
The RTD cocktails market is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by consumer demand for convenience without compromising on quality, with a strong trend toward premiumization, an emphasis on high-quality spirits, authentic flavor profiles, and sophisticated packaging. Penelope's bottled format — a 750mL white matte presentation — speaks directly to that premiumization push. A bottle on a home bar signals something different than a can in a cooler, and for the whiskey drinker who takes his bourbon seriously, that presentation matters.
Building the Series: From Peach to Black Walnut to Blackberry
The Blackberry Old Fashioned is the third entry in what has become a defined ready-to-pour strategy for Penelope. The series began with the Peach Old Fashioned, which the brand described as its debut in the category. That cocktail blended Penelope's award-winning straight bourbon and rye whiskey with peach bitters and farm-sourced 100% pure maple syrup, and was positioned as the first in a series of nationwide releases in Penelope's new ready-to-pour portfolio. It launched as a proof of concept — that Penelope could translate its blending philosophy into a packaged format without losing what made the base spirits worth drinking in the first place.
When Polise first commented on that initial release, the ambition was already evident. He noted that old fashioneds were among his personal favorite cocktails to drink, explaining that when they set out to create a ready-to-pour cocktail, it was clear where to begin, with the goal of creating a cocktail with the same great taste as if it were made from scratch at home or at a great bar — teaming up with Nashville cocktail creator Tim Beckner to build a recipe layered with flavor using quality ingredients you'd find behind any great bar.
The second release, the Black Walnut Old Fashioned, took the template in a darker, earthier direction. Following the success of its Peach Old Fashioned, that release offered a modern take on the classic cocktail, blending award-winning Penelope straight bourbon and rye whiskey with black walnut bitters and vanilla demerara. The cocktail opens with an aroma of warm vanilla, hints of maple, allspice, and cocoa, with tasting notes including fresh brown sugar, light allspice, cinnamon, and vanilla, and a velvety toffee finish with hints of nut and lingering caramel. The Black Walnut expression proved the brand wasn't just chasing approachable flavor profiles — it was willing to go into more contemplative, complex sensory territory.
Both predecessors earned serious hardware. The Peach Old Fashioned and Black Walnut Old Fashioned both earned Platinum medals at the 2025 ASCOT Awards. Award recognition in the premixed category carries different weight than it does for straight spirits — the judging criteria accounts for balance, integration, and whether the ingredients feel like a unified cocktail rather than a combination of separate components. Platinum-level recognition across both releases validates Penelope's blending approach at the core production level.
The Blackberry Old Fashioned represents a deliberate seasonal pivot. Peach leans summer and sweet; black walnut nods toward autumn and warmth; blackberry occupies a liminal middle ground — bright enough for warm-weather drinking, complex enough to carry through into an evening pour. The orange bitters, specifically, give the blackberry expression a cocktail-bar credibility that vanilla demerara can't — orange bitters are a classic aromatic compound, closely associated with the Old Fashioned's original formula, and their inclusion here creates a lineage connection to the cocktail's roots even as the blackberry element does something genuinely contemporary.
Penelope's Award Record and Its Significance to the RTD Conversation
The broader Penelope portfolio continues to collect recognition that gives the ready-to-pour lineup a legitimate premium foundation. The brand's products have won many spirits industry awards, including a Best in Class finalist nod and a Double Gold medal for Toasted at the 2025 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, while Wheated earned a Double Platinum medal and the Peach Old Fashioned and Black Walnut Old Fashioned earned Platinum medals at the 2025 ASCOT Awards. That breadth of recognition — across both the core spirits lineup and the ready-to-pour extensions — is significant because it establishes the brand not as a cocktail convenience play that happens to have some whiskeys attached, but as a legitimate whiskey producer whose cocktail formats are an extension of real craft.
The Cooper Series alone demonstrates how far the brand has stretched its creative ambition. Named after a founder's son, the Cooper Series takes Penelope's straight whiskeys on a world tour, pairing them with wine casks from the finest wine-making regions — from France to Hungary to Spain — to create truly memorable flavor profiles. Those same instincts for layering complexity and using complementary flavors to enhance rather than obscure the whiskey base are visible in the ready-to-pour cocktails. Blackberry and orange bitters aren't random choices — they're the work of blenders who have spent years thinking about how fruit and botanical notes interact with aged grain spirits.
The Luxco Infrastructure Behind the Brand
Penelope doesn't operate in isolation. Penelope Spirits LLC was acquired by Luxco, Inc., a subsidiary of MGP Ingredients, in 2023, though the company continues to be run by its original founders, Michael Paladini and Danny Polise. That structure matters for understanding how the Blackberry Old Fashioned reaches national retail. Independent brands with compelling products often stall at regional distribution — Luxco's infrastructure resolves that problem entirely.
Luxco was founded in St. Louis in 1958 by the Lux family and operates as MGP Ingredients Inc.'s (Nasdaq: MGPI) Branded Spirits division since its acquisition in 2021. The company's extensive portfolio includes brands from four distilleries: Ross & Squibb Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, where Penelope and Remus bourbon are produced; Bardstown, Kentucky-based Lux Row Distillers, home of Rebel, Ezra Brooks, and Blood Oath bourbons; Lebanon, Kentucky-based Limestone Branch Distillery, maker of Yellowstone Bourbon; and Arandas, Mexico-based Destiladora Gonzalez Lux, producer of 100% agave tequilas.
Penelope is distilled at MGP's historical Ross & Squibb distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana — a facility with deep roots in American whiskey production and the technical capability to produce the kind of multi-grain, carefully blended expressions that define Penelope's house style. The ready-to-pour cocktails are blended using that same whiskey foundation, which means the quality of the base spirit in the Blackberry Old Fashioned is genuinely the same standard that's won double gold medals in open competition.
Pricing, Availability, and What It Means for the Shelf
The Penelope Blackberry Old Fashioned carries an SRP of $29.99 per bottle and will be available at select retailers nationwide starting this month, with direct purchase available at PenelopeBourbon.com. That $29.99 price point is calibrated carefully. It matches the established price for both the Peach and Black Walnut expressions, which means consumers who've been building a collection of the ready-to-pour lineup — and there are clearly enough of them given the ASCOT results — can add the Blackberry edition without any psychological sticker shock.
For context, a bar-quality Old Fashioned in most American cities runs between $14 and $20 per cocktail. A 750mL bottle, poured over ice in proper Old Fashioned proportions, yields multiple servings. The math works strongly in favor of the consumer, especially for the kind of outdoor-gathering scenarios the brand specifically calls out. The $29.99 price point also positions the Blackberry Old Fashioned clearly above the hard seltzer and flavored malt beverage tier, where the brand does not want to compete, and within reach of the craft cocktail consumer who has genuine standards but doesn't always have the time or the bar setup to meet them.
What the Old Fashioned Gets Right as a Format Vehicle
There's a reason Penelope has staked its entire ready-to-pour identity on variations of the Old Fashioned rather than reaching for Manhattans, sours, or highballs. The Old Fashioned is, structurally, the simplest serious cocktail in the American canon: spirit, sweetener, bitters, expression. Strip it down to its bones and you have essentially a vehicle for showcasing aged whiskey, which is exactly what a whiskey brand should be doing in the ready-to-pour space. The classic cocktail's architecture accommodates substitution in the sweetener element — maple syrup, vanilla demerara, blackberry simple syrup — without losing its fundamental identity, whereas a Manhattan is more brittle, a sour more texturally complex, a highball more dependent on carbonation dynamics.
The consumer also arrives pre-educated. The Old Fashioned has been the most-ordered cocktail in American bars for several consecutive years. Men who drink bourbon already know what an Old Fashioned is, already have calibrated expectations for it, and are already primed to evaluate a ready-to-pour version against a mental benchmark. When Polise says "An Old Fashioned is one of those cocktails people already know and love," he's making a product strategy argument: the entry barrier is essentially zero, and the standard of judgment is already embedded in the target drinker's vocabulary.
The Bigger Picture: Penelope's Dual-Track Growth Strategy
The Blackberry Old Fashioned doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of Penelope's 2026 momentum. Just two weeks before this release, Penelope announced the launch of Architects of Golf, a new limited-edition collection featuring three expressions inspired by the brand's earliest foundations. The Architects of Golf collection traces back to 2018, when Penelope Bourbon began with two friends, Michael Paladini and Danny Polise, 18 holes of golf, and a shared exchange of ideas that would evolve into something much larger. That limited-release, collector-focused play operates at a fundamentally different price point — bottled at 94 proof, the first three bottles in the Architects of Golf collection carry an SRP of $59.99 per bottle.
Put the two moves together and the strategy becomes legible: premium limited releases for the enthusiast and collector market at one end; award-validated ready-to-pour cocktails for the everyday-occasion consumer at the other. The brand is not choosing between accessibility and prestige — it's engineering both tracks simultaneously, using competitive awards recognition as the connective tissue that gives credibility to every tier of the portfolio.
Penelope continues to innovate within its Cooper Series, Limited Releases, and Estate Collection to further establish its place among the top premium whiskey brands. The Cooper Series alone — with expressions finished in French rosé casks, Hungarian Tokaji barrels, Spanish orange wine wood, and Brazilian oak — demonstrates the breadth of the flavor exploration the founders are willing to undertake. The ready-to-pour lineup is part of that same exploratory culture, just packaged for a different consumption context.
Industry Implications: Whiskey Brands and the RTD Battleground
Penelope is not alone in recognizing where the puck is heading. Across the spirits industry, established names are accelerating their entry into premixed formats. Spirit brand owners including Diageo, Bacardi, and Pernod Ricard are launching canned and bottled RTD extensions of established cocktail brands, transferring brand equity from the spirits shelf to the RTD cooler. The Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola canned partnership represents one end of the spectrum; Campari's premium glass-bottled pre-mixed Negroni, launched in early 2025, represents another. Penelope's bottled, bar-format approach to the Old Fashioned sits closer to the Campari model — this is a spirit-forward, presentation-conscious format aimed at consumers who are choosing up, not down.
For independent and semi-independent whiskey brands without the hundred-million-dollar marketing budgets of the category giants, the RTD cocktail format offers something particularly valuable: trial-driving at retail without requiring a bartender as intermediary. A consumer who picks up a bottle of Penelope Blackberry Old Fashioned at a grocery store or specialty retailer, tries it, and finds the whiskey base genuinely impressive now has a direct pathway to the brand's core spirits lineup. The ready-to-pour product becomes, in effect, the most approachable entry point in the portfolio — an ambassador bottle that doesn't require any prior familiarity with Penelope's blending philosophy.
In the United States, more than 64% of millennials reported purchasing RTD cocktails in the past year — a demographic cohort that has also driven the resurgence of classic cocktail culture in American bars over the past decade. These are not consumers who are unfamiliar with what a proper Old Fashioned tastes like. They've ordered them, they've made them, and they know the difference between a well-built version and a cheap imitation. The premium, spirits-first architecture of the Penelope lineup is precisely calibrated to earn their trust rather than simply catch their eye.
A Lineup With Real Momentum
The Blackberry Old Fashioned arrives as the third entry in a ready-to-pour series that has already demonstrated it can win industry recognition and — more importantly — consumer repeat purchase. Founded in 2018, Penelope Bourbon has become one of the fastest-growing award-winning premium whiskey brands, offering a range of uniquely blended and finished straight bourbon and whiskey expressions known for their smoothness and rich flavor, alongside premium handcrafted ready-to-serve cocktails. The Blackberry Old Fashioned continues that trajectory with a seasonal, fruit-forward expression timed for the summer market while carrying enough aromatic complexity to hold up well beyond it.
The brand has essentially built a proof of concept over the previous two releases and is now in expansion mode — each new addition to the ready-to-pour series extending the palette of occasions and flavor preferences the lineup can serve. Peach and summer afternoons; black walnut and an autumn evening fire; blackberry and, well, any warm evening where the standard bearer needs something just slightly off the beaten Old Fashioned path. That's not category sprawl — that's deliberate curation, the same instinct that drives the Cooper Series' tour of global wine casks applied to the more democratic format of a bottle anyone can pick off a shelf for thirty dollars.
For the whiskey drinker who has always believed that convenience and craft are incompatible, the Penelope Blackberry Old Fashioned is a direct and well-constructed argument to the contrary. The base whiskeys are real. The bitters are functional. The blackberry simple syrup is doing genuine aromatic work rather than just providing sweetness. At 76 proof, the pour isn't watered down. And at $29.99 — pour for pour, occasion for occasion — the case for picking one up rather than assembling it yourself from scratch is harder to dismiss than it might seem.
