In case you haven’t been following our latest reviews, I bought several holiday / winter themed bottles last November with every intention of writing them up as a proper Christmas feature. Then I procrastinated. Around June I decided it would be funnier to run it as a “Christmas in July” piece instead. Then I procrastinated again.
So it’s the first week of August, I’m in North Carolina, it is aggressively humid, and I am about to drink eggnog.
I should be honest about my bias up front, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest: I hate eggnog. I hate milk. I hate eggs. I hate cloyingly sweet drinks. Eggnog manages to be all three at once, and it’s a holiday tradition I have never understood. I’ve written about this before — back in 2022 I mixed nine different spirits into store-bought nog purely to find out whether any of them could rescue it, concluded spiced rum came closest, and finished the whole exercise still thinking the stuff was gross.
So when I say I procrastinated on this bottle, I want to be clear that it wasn’t really procrastination. It was avoidance. And it has a consequence that the other bottles on my shelf didn’t: this one contains real dairy cream and real eggs, and I have left it sitting out, unrefrigerated, for nine months. Before we get to how it tastes, we need to talk about whether drinking it was a defensible decision.
A Note on the Nine Months
I want to deal with this properly rather than just play it for laughs, because it’s a genuine question and the answer turns out to be more reassuring than I deserved.
Here’s what the manufacturer actually says, and the distinction matters enormously: unopened, the bottle is shelf-stable. Heaven Hill’s guidance generally lands around twelve months, and some retailers cite up to two years, because 15% ABV is a meaningful preservative. Opened, it needs to go in the refrigerator and be consumed within roughly six months.
So if your bottle was sealed for those nine months (which mine was, since I’m cracking it open for the first time today), you’re inside the intended window and the alcohol has been doing its job the entire time. If it had been opened last November and left on a warm shelf, that’s a completely different situation and I’d have poured it out without tasting it.
I’m not a food scientist and this isn’t food safety advice. But the practical rule is simple: sealed on a shelf, fine. Opened, refrigerate it. If yours is open and has been sitting out, don’t be a hero over a twelve dollar bottle.
For the record: mine showed no separation that a good shake didn’t resolve, no off smell, and no sourness. Nothing about it suggested the liquid had turned. Every complaint I’m about to make is aesthetic.
History
The name on this bottle is, as ever, a piece of historical fan fiction.
Evan Williams bottles claim “Kentucky’s 1st Distiller” and the year 1783. The Filson Historical Society (the people who actually maintain Kentucky’s historical record) consider much of that story unsupported. The earliest recorded reference to Williams as a distiller doesn’t surface until an 1892 publication, more than a century later, and Williams himself doesn’t appear to have arrived in the area until 1794, eleven years after the date printed on the label. The brand as sold today launched in 1957 and has no connection to the man beyond his name.
The real history belongs to Heaven Hill. It was founded in Bardstown in 1935 as Old Heavenhill Springs Distillery by a group of post-Prohibition investors — one of whom, Joseph L. Beam, was Jim Beam’s first cousin and became the first master distiller. The Shapira family bought out the other investors and renamed the operation, though Joseph Beam’s descendants still hold the master distiller role today. In 1996, the distillery burned down, taking 90,000 barrels with it and setting the creek below the property on fire for nearly two miles. The company bought the Bernheim facility from Diageo in 1999, moved production there, and kept aging in Bardstown. Today it’s the largest independent family-owned spirits producer in the country and the second-largest holder of Kentucky bourbon.
The eggnog is not a new gimmick. Evan Williams Original Southern Egg Nog has been a Heaven Hill fixture for decades and is the number-one selling nog in the category — the anchor product that their fall cider seasonal was later built to complement. This Peppermint White Chocolate expression is the line extension, the “what if we did the thing but also with candy canes” entry that virtually every successful seasonal eventually produces.
Product
A cream liqueur is a genuinely simple concept: dairy cream, alcohol, sugar, flavorings. What separates the good ones from the bad ones is whether the dairy is real and whether the emulsion holds.
Here, it’s real. The Original Southern formula is documented as a blend of Kentucky Straight Bourbon, blended whiskey, rum, and brandy, combined with actual eggs, milk, cream, sugar, and a spice mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla — then homogenized and bottled in Bardstown. That’s a more complicated build than “bourbon plus cream” and the multi-spirit base is a traditional eggnog approach rather than a modern shortcut. This peppermint white chocolate version is that same platform with peppermint and white chocolate flavoring layered in, bottled at 15% ABV, 30 proof.
That proof figure matters twice over. It’s the preservative doing the work discussed above, and it’s also why this isn’t legally whiskey: the TTB requires 40% ABV for whisky and 30% for flavored whisky, so at 15% this is a cream liqueur, classified and taxed as such.
What Heaven Hill doesn’t publish is the sugar content or whether the peppermint and white chocolate flavorings are natural or artificial. Based on the glass I’d guess the peppermint is a fairly clean extract — it reads more like actual mint than like candy — but that’s an impression, not a disclosure.
Packaging
This is a standard Evan Williams bottle with a new label and cap, running a red color theme that’s unmistakably festive without tipping into tacky. It reads clearly as a holiday product from across the aisle, which is the whole job.
The genuinely notable thing is that you can see the contents, and the contents are milky white. Sitting on the shelf, this bottle looks like it’s full of the stuff that comes out of the androids in Alien when they get torn apart. I mean that as description rather than criticism — it’s arresting, and it’s the most visually distinctive bottle Evan Williams puts out.
That visibility deserves credit, because it’s not this brand’s default. Evan Williams’ standard bourbon bottles are wrapped in labels that swallow nearly the entire face of the glass, a practice that exists largely so bar patrons can’t tell they’re being poured from a nearly empty bottle, and one that hides a perfectly nice amber spirit for no good reason. Here they’ve left the liquid on display. When your product looks this strange, hiding it would have been the cowardly move.
Neat (Room Temperature)
In the glass, the milky white picks up a slight brown tint — less like a glass of milk, more like a latte.
The aroma is genuinely good, and it’s the first pleasant surprise here. What I get is exactly an Italian latte with shaved dark chocolate over the top: coffee-adjacent creaminess, real cocoa, a little sweetness underneath. Notably, no peppermint at all on the nose — just chocolate. Whatever the mint is doing, it isn’t volatile enough to make the trip.
But then, taking a sip at room temperature, I know I’ve made a mistake.
This is a hateful liquid and it made me briefly regret every decision that led to me owning it. And I want to be precise about the problem, because it isn’t the flavor — it’s the texture. A cream liqueur is engineered to be silky and coating, and when it’s cold that’s a pleasure. At room temperature it’s just thick. Warm, heavy, clinging to the inside of your mouth like something that shouldn’t be there. Drinking a room-temperature dairy product is a choice, and it’s a stupid one, and I made it so you don’t have to.
The flavors themselves are the opposite problem — they’re actually pretty good. The peppermint arrives up front, clean and bright, and it plays beautifully against the chocolate I picked up on the nose. Peppermint and chocolate are a classic holiday pairing for the excellent reason that they work, and I have no complaints on the composition whatsoever.
That said, there is no trace of bourbon here. I can’t find caramel, vanilla, oak, or anything else the base whiskey does well. What I can detect, after a few sips, is the alcohol content quietly making itself known… which is its own kind of warning label on a drink this easy to consume.
On Ice
This is how the product is meant to be served, and the improvement is immediate and substantial.
Chilled, the texture problem largely resolves. It’s still creamy and thick, but cold cream reads as luxurious where warm cream reads as wrong (and slightly alarming). Here, the same liquid serves a completely different experience — the single biggest neat-to-chilled swing I’ve encountered in a while.
The peppermint comes through more cleanly when cold, sharpening up and cutting against the richness. The white chocolate supplies sweetness and a complementary creamy-vanilla note that sits well alongside it. Both flavors are well-executed and clearly identifiable, which is more than a lot of flavored products manage.
The whiskey remains completely absent, buried under the velvet of the egg and dairy, gone without a trace. At 15% ABV against that much cream, there was never going to be a contest.
And on the eight-month question: nothing tastes off. It’s fine. The alcohol did its job.
Overall Rating
Let me separate two questions, because I owe you that given everything I said at the top.
Is this a good eggnog? Yes, honestly. It is not the worst version I’ve had, and it isn’t close. The peppermint and white chocolate come through clearly, they’re well balanced against each other, the dairy is real, the emulsion holds, and served cold, it does exactly what a holiday cream liqueur is supposed to do. At $8–15 for a 750ml, that’s a legitimately good deal for a ready-to-pour party product, and if you’re someone who buys nog every December, you will like this. The awards shelf isn’t nothing either: this line has been collecting Consumers’ Choice and gold medals for years, and the base product outsells every other nog on the market.
Is it interesting? Not remotely. Evan Williams took two flavors everybody already knows are delicious together, dropped them into their established nog base, and printed a label. Peppermint and white chocolate isn’t a discovery; it’s the flavor profile of every other seasonal coffee drink, candy, and creamer sold between Halloween and New Year’s. There’s no creative risk here, no idea, nothing that required anyone to think hard. It’s competent line extension, and competent line extension is precisely what it tastes like.
That’s a 3/5 — solid, does its job, good value at the price, nothing special. I’ll flag the tension with the Eggo Sippin’ Cream, which earned a 4/5 despite arguably being the worse-made product: the difference is that Eggo was a genuine surprise, an absurd gimmick that turned out to work, while this is exactly as good as you’d predict from reading the label. Novelty is worth something; predictability isn’t.
And if you want to know whether this changed my mind about eggnog: it did not. Nine months of dread, and what I learned is that I should refrigerate things and that peppermint goes with chocolate. Eggnog is still disgusting. This is simply a well-made version of a disgusting thing — a review that, I fully acknowledge, says considerably more about me than it does about Heaven Hill.
| Evan Williams Peppermint White Chocolate Egg Nog Production Location: Unknown Classification: Other Aging: No Age Statement (NAS) Proof: 15% ABV Price: $9.99 / 750 ml Overall Rating:   |
Overall Rating: 3/5
It’s the best glass of something I hate that I’ve ever had.