It was first bottled and marketed in 1870 by the former pharmaceutical salesman turned bourbon-merchant George Garvin Brown – the founder of the Brown–Forman Corporation (whose descendants still manage the company).

[3] Old Forester is produced under the supervision of Master Distiller Chris Morris (as of 2006)[4] at the Brown–Forman distillery in Shively, Kentucky, (which is located directly adjacent to the pre-merger Southwest boundary of Louisville) and at Old Forester Distilling Co. (located in Downtown Louisville, KY on historic Whisky Row in the original building used from 1882 to 1919) using a mash bill of 72% corn (maize), 18% rye, and 10% malted barley[2] (the same mash bill used for Woodford Reserve[5]).

The innovation introduced with Old Forester was not that it was available in such bottles, but that it was the first bourbon to be exclusively available in this fashion – providing a greater level of assurance of quality for that brand relative to other products in the market.

[4] This innovation was enabled and further fueled by emerging advances in the mass production of glass bottles, such as those soon to be developed by Michael Owens.

[9] To produce his Old Forester product, Brown would initially purchase whiskies from distillers such as John McDougal Atherton and Ben Mattingly, and blend them together.