All The Double Gold-Winning Straight Bourbons From This Year’s San Francisco World Spirits CompetitionĦ.We Tasted Bourbon Whiskeys ‘Double-Blind’ And Tried To Guess Each Bottle.The Best Ten-Year-Old Bourbon Whiskeys, Tasted Blind And Ranked.We Blind Tasted Classic Bourbons And Were Shocked By The Winner.We Blind Tasted A Whole Bunch Of $30-60 Bourbons To See If Any Could Beat Weller.Multitudes, folks!Īlright, let’s dive in and rank some great bourbon - on taste alone - from the bottom shelf.Īlso Read: The Top 5 UPROXX Bourbon Posts Of The Last Six Months That said, this is also a cheap bourbon that’s having a bit of a moment thanks to awards love over the last year or two (it’s still a Buffalo Trace product after all). If, say, a few barrels of Eagle Rare or Old Charter don’t quite meet the flavor profile standards of those brands, those barrels will likely end up (ie, be blended out) in a Benchmark, which is still a bottom-shelf whiskey. That said, Buffalo Trace is still a business with a bottom line too. Benchmark is batched, proofed, and bottled to match Benchmark’s flavor profile, not Taylor’s or Stagg’s. Each of the bourbons from that famed mash bill are still all housed and aged in unique ways that inform the flavor profile of the final product. While using the same mash bill doesn’t quite make Benchmark the “poor man’s Eagle Rare,” it does speak to the quality of the spirit that goes into the barrel and eventually the bottles. We do know that the same mash bill is used to make Buffalo Trace Bourbon, Stagg, Eagle Rare, Old Charter, and Colonel E.H. Of course, Buffalo Trace doesn’t divulge the exact parameters of any of their bills, so we don’t know how “low” the rye content is or how “high” the corn content is. 1,” which is their low-rye bourbon mash (one of Buffalo Trace’s four core mash bills overall). Benchmark is just such a whiskey, and today I’m going to rank the whole line.īenchmark is one of the many brands that come from Buffalo Trace’s “Mash Bill no.
The thing is, Buffalo Trace is a massive distillery operation with 19 brands coming off their stills, which means they’re also producing plenty of inexpensive bourbon whiskey. Buffalo Trace is renowned for high-priced bourbon whiskey that, these days, is damn near unattainable ( Weller, Pappy, Stagg, Eagle Rare…).