The 21 Best Whiskeys Of 2023

Whiskey had a heck of a 2023. Great bottles populated the calendar in every genus of the brown liquor and finished big in Q4. The variety of emergent from minuscule changes to a handful of production factors is striking. 

For example: With the U.S. government recognizing American single malt, a new category of spirits will bring scrutiny to subtler spirits, minus the unsustainable demand for new oak barrels. There's a lot of life left in that oak for anyone willing to wait a few more years, and reused barrels yield interesting results, both from the whiskey world and from barrel exchange programs with other alcohol producers. 

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 to drink this year, here are the other whiskeys (and whiskies) we're most excited about in 2023. And just to be fair, we made it a mix of rarities with attainable bottles in both availability and price point. 

Some of these bottles were provided as complimentary samples from their producers for review purposes. 

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.

Of late it seems Islay's eschewing Scotland's brand of ancient whisky craftsmanship and enjoying its artsy/punky phase. (See also Smokehead, an Islay that revels in the island's reputation for death by peatiness.) Which brings us to BizarreBQ, the new release from a label that has previously staked out really traditional territory.

BizarreBQ won't actually evoke slow-cooked meats with tangy sauces, but if you use the term to mean grilling it has a really — and we mean really — nice nose that will illustrate to anyone the toasty difference between smoky and peaty by embodying both. Sniff it next to something like Ole Smoky Moonshine, then Bruichladdich Octomore, and you'll triangulate the middle. This does make picking out what else rides in the nose difficult, but the juice itself is clear and kind of fruity, then back to the toast. There's no ethanol scorch to speak of.

Its taste is surprisingly mild. It rides the oak and lemon side of things without getting nutty, and its mild bitterness tracks with its aims of seared meat. All of this remains on the good side of oaky rather than aspirin. Again, it doesn't bring barbecue to mind in the American sense, but there is somebody to it despite the smooth, pleasant taste and lack of burn ... or only a pleasant, small amount. Looking at the label's 50.9% ABV, you can see where it comes from even as it impresses with its gentleness.

Qualified as a bourbon, but even more technically not interested in that appellation, it's America's favorite whiskey, right? Yeah? Look, we don't need to get esoteric with some single-rickhouse whiskey that only produced 100 bottles of a blue corn-and-spelt mash bill. Jack Daniel's new age-statement expressions are universally agreed to be a resounding triumph for the most ubiquitous of Tennessee whiskeys. If you're clutching the first batch too tightly to ever uncork what you quite rightly fear is a collector's item, permit yourself to unwind with the good stuff. 

Smoke and stone fruits blend together in this boss bottle of what was, in last year's batch at least, fairly regarded as the best thing to ever come out of the Lincoln County process. While Jack Daniel's 12-year, debuting recently, is an even better get, good luck finding that masterpiece. Yes, technically, it's the one we should be recommending: so momentous was its arrival. But, you're just not going to source it, nor the used Honda it would cost you to buy it. The much more obtainable 10-year is the Jack of all trades and purchases.

That said, don't think it will be easy to find. This 10-year is still a bit of a hunt, however more affordable and findable it may be. But that's the fun of it.

Another wonderful Whistle Pig release that tastes like a 25-year-old scotch masked as undisclosed-age straight rye. Do you like mead? Here's your birthday wish bottle. The tenth installment of the highly anticipated Boss Hog, dubbed The Commandments, blows up expectations, thanks to a double-barrel finish. The second cask is the highly evident mead, but the first is the real curiosity, using barrels that once housed Whistle Pig's mysterious experimental spirit "infused with aromatic resins from the genera commonly known as frankincense and myrrh" to put a New Testament bow on this Old Testament title, and even more intriguingly, a mixture of rye and whey! (We promise autocorrect isn't maligning "whiskey.")

The tenth edition of this rye is sweet and easy from start to finish. The mead pushes forward from lips to linger with grape, then lemon, then honeysuckle. A minimal and pleasant amount of bite invigorates at first, and after it fades, the chew yields astringency and a touch of tobacco. Even then, it quickly washes away into the Winesap apple-and-honey taste that makes this whiskey oh so good.

As the finish subsides, you'll get rye pepperiness at last, mixed with savory tones of the oaked variety, and these, too, are smooth. Boss Hog X isn't just candy — it's that Wonka candy that took Violet Beauregarde on an entire astral trip through tasting notes. The difference is you will assuredly not be blue after trying this.

There are only two Australian whiskies available in the U.S., and they're both champions. Starward returns to the list to drop jaws at a great deal: approximately one Benjamin for a fantastic bottle. As with the rest of the family, Stout Cask's far-flung qualities are absent from domestic distillate, so there's simply nothing like it on U.S. territory.

There's big citrus on the nose — lemon and orange, then some peachy stone fruit. It's not advertised as sour mash, but it wouldn't surprise our noses to learn. That might be the stout's influence, though.

Swirled in a Glencairn, this drink wears a necklace of beads and nothing more than a few, irregular legs. This is sticky stuff that gives apple up top and peanut on the finish — and somehow, both taste like bourbon? This is crazy. Perhaps the red wine barrels that matured it are making an interesting combination with the stout cask finish. There's a small bit of oak as a nutty finish, but the bitter/astringent intersection is where it gets interesting. Rather than the usual note to be tamed or tolerated, this woody characteristic really gives the silky sip some heft. There's no burn.

Put it on the rocks, and honey jumps out like a supercharged Jameson. There's no bad way to pour Stout Cask. You'll be hard-pressed to find a smoother whisky, which, at 52% ABV, tricks you into expecting a much lower proof on the label. This is the easiest-drinking stuff we've ever tried, and it's just plain fun.

We tasted a lot — seriously a lot — of whiskey this year, and researched the rest to mingle personal tasting notes with the general consensus of internet enthusiasts. No one person's opinion is the final say, and there are so many commendable whiskeys beyond even an oversized list like this one. Hard cuts were made. We agonized about repeating a brand under different products when so many distillers deserve the spotlight — but concluded that the distillery or blender is not the threshold so much as the label and batch. 

In the end, it came down to: what would we go out and buy, and what did we text our whiskey-drinking friends to say, "You've got to get yourself some of this"? While distillers have to use a lot of metrics to make wonderful whiskey, there's no accounting for taste at the cash register. You can only go by the compiled reports of enough savvy drinkers to form a reliable recommendation, and your gut ... or tongue in this case. 

And with all that said, if you get your hands on some Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, don't wait forever to drink it. Some releases are so big their gravity would throw a list like this out of whack.