The New Orleans Spirits Competition started in 2022 and is run by people who have spent years shaping how spirits get judged. Co-founder Andrew Faulkner spent 14 years at the American Distilling Institute, where he wrote judging protocols later adopted by other competitions, while operations director Matthew Sharpe helped establish the American Craft Spirits Association’s first competition in 2014.
Entries are scored blind by professional panels, and the highest scorers in each class go through to a championship round decided in front of an audience during Tales of the Cocktail.
Seven bourbons took Best of Category honors in 2026, and here is a closer look at each one.
Signup now to make sure you don't miss out on the latest whiskey news and deals.
By Signing up, you accept and agree to our Terms of Services and you acknowledge our Privacy Statement. The Whiskey Wash is protected by reCAPTCHA, and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Signup now to make sure you don't miss out on the latest whiskey news and deals.
By Signing up, you accept and agree to our Terms of Services and you acknowledge our Privacy Statement. The Whiskey Wash is protected by reCAPTCHA, and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Firestone & Robertson Distilling Co. TX Straight Bourbon
Award: Best of Category – Bourbon No Age Statement
Trending Content
Tasting Notes: Floral, maple, cinnamon, fig, allspice, brown sugar
Find Your Next Bottle: $46.99 / £35
Every Kirkland Bourbon Ranked, From Worst to Best
READ THE STORY
TX Bourbon, as the name would suggest, is made in Texas, and the company that makes it continues what has become something of a Texan whiskey tradition: innovation.
Firestone & Robertson ferments with a proprietary yeast strain that head distiller Rob Arnold isolated from a pecan nut in Glen Rose, Texas, selected from more than 100 wild samples collected around the north of the state. The company gave it the designation RHB-422 and calls it Brazos.
Leonard Firestone and Troy Robertson founded the business in 2010, and production later moved to Whiskey Ranch, a 112-acre site on the former Glen Garden Country Club, where a 45-foot Vendome copper column still and doubler are fed by five 16,000-gallon fermenters.
The mash bill for this bourbon uses Texas yellow dent corn, Texas soft red winter wheat, and six-row distillers malt. Pernod Ricard acquired the company in 2019, and the bourbon is bottled at 90 proof.
Blackland Texas Pecan Brown Sugar Bourbon
Award: Best of Category – Flavored Bourbon
Tasting Notes: Pecan, muscovado brown sugar, oak
Find Your Next Bottle: $59.80 / £45
Flavored whiskey tends to get overlooked in competition coverage, though New Orleans runs a category for it, and this is the bottle that came out on top.
Blackland begins with its own small-batch bourbon and layers in pecan essence and Muscovado brown sugar sourced from Mauritius. It is bottled at 70 proof, the lowest strength among the seven winners here.
Markus Kypreos, a lawyer turned chef turned distiller, opened Blackland in Fort Worth’s Foundry District in 2019, and the production floor runs on computerized pot and column stills known as iStills alongside stainless steel mash tuns.
The pecan expression arrived in 2020 and has since become the distillery’s best seller. Kypreos told the Fort Worth Report in 2023 that it made up “about 50% of our sales.”
Larceny Barrel Proof C925
Award: Best of Category – Wheated Bourbon
Tasting Notes: Toasted bread, maple, cinnamon, molasses, fig, hazelnut
Find Your Next Bottle: $49 / £39
Larceny is one of the quintessential bourbons on the market at present. Since its launch in 2012, the brand has become well-known for its Small Batch and Barrel Proof releases that balance approachability and complexity.,
Heaven Hill puts out three Larceny Barrel Proof releases a year, and C925 identifies the third of them, from September 2025.
Larceny carries on the wheated Old Fitzgerald recipe Heaven Hill acquired in 1999. John E. Fitzgerald was assumed for decades to have been a distillery owner, until Sally Van Winkle Campbell’s 1999 family biography established that he was a bonded treasury agent who used his rickhouse keys to help himself to the best barrels.
The mash bill is 68% corn, 20% wheat, and 12% malted barley, and each release blends barrels aged six to eight years, bottled uncut and without chill filtration. C925 was bottled at 119.6 proof.
Starlight Mizunara Reserve Bourbon Whiskey
Award: Best of Category – Cask-Finished Bourbon
Tasting Notes: Sandalwood, toasted coconut, vanilla bean, baking spice, caramelized sugar, exotic wood character
Find Your Next Bottle: $149.99 / £113
Mizunara is a type of Japanese oak, famed for its rarity, porosity, extremely long regeneration cycle, and for imparting distinct notes of sandalwood and incense. Not only is it a rare finishing cask altogether, but even rarer in terms of its use for finishing bourbon. However, Starlight has managed to produce a world-class product with this choice of finishing cask.
The bourbon is estate-distilled using a sweet mash process and double pot distillation, then matured in new charred American oak before the Mizunara casks come into play. The release blends the distillery’s three-grain and four-grain mash bills, with the grain grown on site, and spends around seven years in oak followed by several months in the Japanese wood.
The Huber family settled at Starlight, Indiana, from Baden-Baden, Germany in 1843 and now works the estate in its seventh generation. Bourbon production started in 2013. Proof shifts from batch to batch, generally falling between 112 and 116.
K.LUKE Batch 15 Barrel Strength Bourbon
Award: Best of Category – Cask-Strength Bourbon
Tasting Notes: Butter, crème brûlée, raspberry, black cherry, apricot, honey, nougat, French silk pie, sweet oak, leather, brown sugar, peach, citrus peel, nuts
Find Your Next Bottle: $109.99 / £83
K.LUKE does not own a distillery, and its whiskey comes from barrels bought elsewhere and blended in house.
Jonathan and Jennifer Maisano launched the brand in 2021 and named it for their two children, Kaitlyn and Lucas. Jonathan made his first barrel selection trip to Kentucky in 2014 and has since tasted more than 1,600 barrels. Both he and Jennifer work through each blend blind, adjusting one barrel at a time until they arrive at a version worth bottling. He was named Blender of the Year at the 2024 Barleycorn Awards.
Batch 15 brings together ten barrels from several Kentucky and Indiana distilleries, aged between eight and twelve years, yielding 1,703 bottles at just over 118 proof.
Low Gap Straight Bourbon Old Fussbudget 8 Years Old
Award: Best of Category – Bourbon, 6-10 YO
Tasting Notes: Caramel, oak, dark chocolate, baking spices
Find Your Next Bottle: $389.99 / £299
Low Gap comes out of brandy country rather than bourbon country. Crispin Cain worked for seven years as assistant distiller to Hubert Germain-Robin, the brandy maker who brought Cognac methods to Mendocino County, before setting up his own operation with his wife Tamar Kaye in 2005.
The whiskey is double distilled on an antique Charentais Cognac pot still at Tamar Distillery in Redwood Valley, California, and the mash is fermented to dryness beforehand.
Old Fussbudget is a limited bottling built on a mash bill of 65% corn, 20% malted barley, and 15% malted rye, which puts malted grain at a third of the recipe. It spent eight years in new charred oak and is bottled at cask strength, around 59% ABV.
Proof & Wood Tumblin’ Dice 11 Year Old Bottled-in-Bond Bourbon
Award: Best of Category – Bourbon Bottled-in-Bond
Tasting Notes: Caramel, vanilla, oak, baking spice, leather, dried fruit, toffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, cocoa
Find Your Next Bottle: N/A
Bottled-in-Bond has a precise legal meaning. The 1897 act calls for whiskey from a single distillation season and a single distillery, aged at least four years in a federally supervised warehouse, and bottled at exactly 100 proof.
This release clears the age requirement by a wide margin. It was distilled at MGP in Indiana in the fall of 2014, aged a minimum of eleven years in new charred oak, and bottled by Bluegrass Bottling in Bardstown, yielding roughly 400 cases from a mash bill of 99% corn and 1% barley.
Dave Schmier started Proof & Wood in 2015 after selling his Redemption brand to Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits, and this is the company’s first bonded bottling.
Final Thoughts
The seven winners have little in common in how they are made. Four come from distilleries producing their own spirit, one from a long-established Kentucky producer, and two from blenders who buy barrels from other distilleries and put the components together themselves. Texas accounts for two of the seven, which is worth noting in a category still dominated by Kentucky.
Have you tried any of these Best of Category winners? Are there any you would like to seek out? And what do you make of the results? Let us know in the comments.
