The 13 Best 2023 Whiskeys So Far

Whiskey is having a heck of a 2023. With the U.S. government formalizing American single malt, we can expect a bundle of spirits to enter the same regard given to bourbon and rye, minus the frankly unsustainable demand for new oak barrels. But even that major development aside, look at all the great stuff coming out. One of the great things about whiskey is how much variety emerges from minuscule changes to just a handful of factors. And when you realize there's a lot of life left in that oak for anyone willing to wait a few more years, you start to get really interesting results from reused barrels, both from the whiskey world, and from barrel exchange programs with other spirits, wines, and beer brewers.

It's also already a year of in-company innovations. WhistlePig released its first single malt, Orphan Barrel just dropped its first rye, Jack Daniel's continues a couple straight years of ground-breaking debuts by putting out a 12-year ... there's no denying it's an exciting time to be a whiskey drinker no matter which way your tastes run. So while we already enumerated the best bourbons of the year, when it comes to the family of whiskeys (and whiskies), here are the releases we're most excited about in 2023 so far.

Two things you don't see often enough in these United States: Bowmore special releases and Aston Martins. While we can't help you with the latter, we can point you to the Bowmore Masters' Selection 22 Year Old single malt Scotch whisky. Also known as Master's Selection: Edition Two, it's part of an ongoing partnership with/tribute to the Aston Martin luxury car line. Both are luxe products at home in a 007 installment. Aston Martin's also designed some bottles for the Scotch brand housing, including a 52-year-old whiskey priced around a quarter of a million dollars. But let's focus on what we have a prayer of affording.

While we haven't been lucky enough to sample it ourselves, reviews describe a sweet, salty, smoky journey through the Scottish micro-region of Islay: small in landmass but a powerhouse in productivity and distilling knowledge. Make no mistake: it's a pricy bottle at $450, but that's also a typical price for Scotches in this age range, which are also typically the Scotches worth your time to try. Nothing's guaranteed, but Islay and advanced-age whiskies are safer bets than most.

Yes, Virginia, there are other whiskeys in Tennessee besides Jack, Dickel, and Nearest, though not all of them apply to the standards designating Tennessee Whiskey. See Chattanooga Whiskey, whose bourbons-but-not have been primarily focused on the effects of malted barley as a taste agent, referring to its product as high malt whiskey, and it's easy to see the point with the careful selection put into the barley used.

With that locus, something like the Silver Oak Cabernet Cask Finished offering was inevitable; it blends five single malt mash bills into a mixture that spends a year and a half calling Sonoma cabernet sauvignon casks home. Not a drop of corn in the mix. The result is a whiskey for all seasons, where fresh fruit flavors team up with herbal accents to hold their own against a heavily sweet and earthy base.

This is a very limited run whiskey, but Chattanooga has yet to land the respect it deserves among the general population, so it's still spottable if it's distributed in your state. Right now it's pulling solid thumbs up from aficionados and devotees, and CEO Tim Piersant made it plain to Forbes that he's more interested in doing new and successful experiments that build an audience than sweeping the dilettante dollar. That means you've still got a shrinking window of time to get it while it's underrated and the tater market isn't inflating its price past all reason.

Now listen here, this is just about as good as a Scotch whisky gets, and at a very fair "fancy but maybe not premium" price of $100 or so. You can thank the sherry casks that have worked out well for Glendronach imparting spicy sweetness on previous iterations to great acclaim. The distillery recommends a couple of drops to open this bronze pour. When you do, you'll get every flavor of a fruitcake, including the not-often-cited treacle. (Ask your great-aunt.) It sounds like this might be a darn fine Christmas tipple if you can keep yourself from drinking it all before then.

You also might want to get it as a steady investment piece: Batch 10 has risen in price by about 80% since last year, and Batch 12 has already arrived. The real question is: what's going to happen when the taters realize the jewels that this series serves up? We're already seeing the price creep from the savvy sippers, and it can't be long before it's bought by reputation as well as merit. But let's be honest, this was made for drinking, not dealing. Don't be the tater.

A running joke in whiskey circles is that Mellow Corn is the recommendation for any occasion, except it's not quite a joke; its peculiar charms are real. The jest lies in the universal utility, and also in pretending like Mellow Corn is less than it is. Yes, the straight corn whiskey looks and tastes like what it is: a no-cost pour so basic it's paradoxically exotic with creamy banana flavors. And yet ... Mellow Corn is pretty good?

Look, just because you have a table at Rao's doesn't mean you can't appreciate the glories of street meat. This distillery gave us fellow "cheap but awesome" label Evan Williams: our top pick for one of the most underrated bourbons. The beloved Mellow Corn is bottled-in-bond(!) with a 90% corn mash bill and no pretensions. Given the high-corn mash bill of other Heaven Hill releases, it's a new oak barrel away from glory, and a middling whiskey can be a great purchase when it's reliably satisfying and priced to sell.

Heaven Hill asked, "What if we aged it five times as long?" for the second bottle in its burgeoning Heritage Collection. The series, released annually, is already as intriguing as desirable. The banana notes remain while stronger corn emerges. It'll cost you $300, but it's the perfect bottle to reunite with college buddies and remember the time when you bonded over the four-year bottle.

Jack's not joking. The debut of a Tennessee whiskey aged 12 years finds a much higher proof than Old No. 7, even landing seven points above last year's Bonded and Triple Mash at 107 proof. Along with the Sinatra Select, the famous brand — maybe even the most famous whiskey brand — has been on quite an expansive tear.

In fact, this year also sees the second expression of the 10-year, brought back in 2021 after more than a century. Still, we're most excited about the new stuff, and the reviews bear that out. Jack 12 is packed with the notes of every rich flavor in the world, by turns sweet and spicy, after offering up a heavenly aroma you might just let sit and stay a while before you go sipping it. Some reviews consider it to be the perfection of the essential Jack Daniel's mash bill. The biggest criticism of this stuff is that Sinatra died before he could try it, but he had a happy enough life regardless.

Now for the bad news: The MSRP on this is $80, but if you can even find it, you're looking at several hundred dollars. That will likely change in time with planned additional expressions, but who's to say if they'll be as good as this one? See if you can't beat the price by ordering a pour at a bar that got it when it was a normal expenditure.

We are so happy to finally get the chance to talk up a bottle of Stranahan's in one of these whiskey roundups. The Colorado distiller was working in this corner of the whiskey industry long before the government officially designated American single malt whiskey as a class unto itself this year, and the company knows its stuff, offering up a beautifully gentle alternative to the fire-and-brimstone bourbons filling the American whiskeyscape.

Unless you intend to go get the Maple Cask or the Blue Peak in person, Diamond Peak Batch #2 might be the most desirable — and attainable — American single malt bottle out this year. After an initial outlay with Bushmills in 2022, the collaborative release series returns. Extra Añejo sees a collaboration with Jose Cuervo, aging a blend of five-to-eight-year Stranahan's in used casks from the Reserva de la Familia line for two years. By reports, the tequila shows up best on the finish after a smooth, soft approach from the whiskey.

Better hurry, though. Attainable is a relative term when it's already out of stock on Stranahan's website, making this a field search. For some people that's half the fun. For everyone else, guess you'd better line up extra early for December's Snowflake release to make up for missing this one.