Bourbon Whiskey

There’s a ton of bourbon out there, folks. So many bottles line shelves that a trip to a liquor store can feel pretty overwhelming. Even pros like me struggle to navigate it and I taste a lot (and I mean a lot) of bourbons every week.

Today, to help you sort the corn from the husk, I’m blind tasting 45 bourbons released over the past 12 months to find the best bourbon EVER…among this bunch. (Sorry, that’s all any test or contest or tasting can try to pin down — the “best taste among the bottles sampled.”) But with so many bottles, this blind test needs structure. 

Here’s how things will go:There are 15 pours per round over three rounds with three categories: straight bourbons (anything average up to and including bottled in bond and wheat or four-grain bourbons), cask strength/barrel proof bourbons, and special cask finished bourbons.

• The top five from each round will move onto the “Finalist” round, creating a new 15-pour set to be tasted blind.
• From the finalists’ round, the top five will move onto the “Championship” round for a final blind tasting.
• Then, I will crown a winner. Shouts to my mother, who poured all of these and kept track of everything.

For clarity’s sake, I did choose the 45 bottles but I did not know which bottles moved forward besides their number in the blind tasting (though I had inklings of what was what after tasting some two or three times). A quick note before we dive in: I’m nosing and tasting through each dram in the first three rounds and going with what jumps out. 

If more than five pours do that, I’ll go back and eliminate pours until five are left by re-nosing and re-tasting (I will not be ranking these pours). In the “finalist” round, I’ll proceed in the same fashion until I’ve whittled it down to a final five (I will not be ranking these pours, either). Finally, in the last round, I’ll be working by a process of elimination by nosing and tasting over and over until a winner is picked. In that elimination run, I’ll rank the bottles.

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