The 2026 North American Bourbon and Whiskey Competition published its results in July, and seven bourbons earned Double Gold. Six of them come from Sazerac, divided between Buffalo Trace and Barton 1792, with Jim Beam Lineage the only winner from another company.
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READ THE STORYNow in its twelfth year and run by Wine Country Network, the competition judged entries double-blind on a 100-point scale in Broomfield, Colorado, on July 11 and 12. A Double Gold requires a score of 95 or above together with a unanimous gold vote from every judge on the panel.
Only one of the seven is a year-round bottling sold at retail price. Here is a closer look at each.
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1792 XV
Award: Double Gold, 96 points
Tasting Notes: Cola, leather, vanilla extract, dark cherries, cocoa, rich oak, dark caramel
Find Your Next Bottle: $249.99
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1792 XV was announced on July 7, 2026, four days before judging began. It is the oldest age-stated bourbon in the 1792 range and the first the brand has bottled at cask strength, resting in virgin charred American white oak for 15 years before going into the bottle uncut and unfiltered at 124.2 proof.
Master Distiller Ross Cornelissen said at the time of release: “This release wasn’t part of a planned experiment in barrel-proof whiskey. We noticed that several of our oldest barrels were developing extraordinary characteristics, with flavors and nuances that stood out on their own.”
Barton 1792 has operated in Bardstown, Kentucky since 1879, and Sazerac acquired it in 2009. XV is sold through Global Travel Retail at airports including LAX, SFO, and Incheon, in one-liter bottles. We may expect it to become an annual release and to reach domestic retail in time.
Eagle Rare 17 Year Old 2025
Award: Double Gold, 96 points
Tasting Notes: Dark tobacco, cherry, leather, pepper, caramel, vanilla
Find Your Next Bottle: $1,880
The 2025 Eagle Rare 17 is older than its label suggests. It was distilled in spring 2007, and the youngest barrels had reached 18 years and four months by the time it was bottled, with around 89% of the original liquid lost to evaporation along the way.
The whiskey comes from Buffalo Trace’s Mash Bill No. 1, the low-rye recipe, and is bottled at 101 proof. Eagle Rare began in 1975 as a 101-proof ten year old made for Seagram by master distiller Charles L. Beam at the Old Prentice Distillery, now Four Roses, and Sazerac bought the brand in 1989. The Antique Collection version was bottled at 90 proof from 2000 through 2017 and returned to 101 with the 2018 release.
Eagle Rare 17 was one of the three bottlings that launched the Antique Collection in 2000. The 2025 edition marked the collection’s 25th anniversary and expanded it to six expressions.
Weller CYPB
Award: Double Gold, 96 points
Tasting Notes: Citrus, oak, vanilla
Find Your Next Bottle: $300 / £195
Weller CYPB is the one bourbon here whose specifications were decided by the public. Buffalo Trace put a survey online asking drinkers to pick the recipe, proof, warehouse location, and age of their ideal bourbon, and the distillery describes the result as the bottling that best matched what “over 100,200 bourbon drinkers voted most for over two years”.
What they settled on was a wheated recipe, aged on the highest floors of the warehouse and bottled at 95 proof. Reviewers and retailers consistently put the age at around eight years, though there is no age statement on the label. The first bottling arrived in 2018.
The wheated mash bill is shared across the W.L. Weller range, and Buffalo Trace has never published the exact grain percentages for it.
William Larue Weller Bourbon 2025
Award: Double Gold, 96 points
Tasting Notes: Vanilla, maple, leather, tobacco, sweet vanilla, toasted oak, ripe fruit
Find Your Next Bottle: $1,800 / £900
William Larue Weller was a Louisville wholesaler and rectifier, widely credited with using wheat in place of rye as bourbon’s secondary grain. Buffalo Trace’s account has him hiring a young salesman named Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle Sr. in 1893, with Van Winkle and Alex Farnsley buying the company in 1908, nine years after Weller’s death, before merging with A. Ph. Stitzel to open the Stitzel-Weller Distillery on Derby Day 1935.
His namesake bourbon is the only wheated whiskey in the Antique Collection. The 2025 bottling blends barrels distilled in 2010, 2011, and 2013, aged 12 years and seven months in new white oak with a number four char, and comes out uncut and unfiltered at 129 proof. Retailers listing Buffalo Trace’s specs put evaporation loss at around 55%.
Jim Beam Lineage
Award: Double Gold, 96 points
Tasting Notes: Creamy toffee, vanilla, leather, char, creme brulee, mature oak
Find Your Next Bottle: $700 (Batch 1) / £560 (Batch 1)
Lineage is the only winner here from outside Sazerac. Batch #2 arrived in July 2025, hand-selected by seventh-generation master distiller Fred Noe and his son Freddie, the eighth generation of the Beam family to hold the title.
Fred Noe said of the release: “Lineage represents a significant moment in the history of Jim Beam. Not only is it a collaboration between the seventh and eighth generation of distillers in our family, but it’s a blend of the past, the present and the future.”
The bourbon is 15 years old, aged in charred white oak barrels at the Booker Noe Plant and bottled at 111 proof. It is sold only at the James B. Beam Distilling Co. campus in Clermont, Kentucky, at $250 for a 700ml bottle, although prices now tend to be much higher.
The first batch came out in 2021 as a travel retail exclusive, one proof point lower.
1792 Single Barrel
Award: Double Gold, 95 points
Tasting Notes: Butterscotch, caramel, fruit, toffee
Find Your Next Bottle: $31 / £52
Of the seven winners, this is the one you can reasonably expect to find on a shelf, with an MSRP in the $40 to $45 range.
Where the flagship 1792 Small Batch blends barrels together for consistency at 93.7 proof, the Single Barrel comes from one cask at a time and is bottled at 98.6 proof. There is no age statement, though Barton gives a minimum of eight years and brings the whiskey down to strength with water from the Tom Moore Spring on the distillery grounds. Barrels are selected from across the aging warehouses, including Warehouse Z.
Barton does not publish the recipe and describes it only as high rye. The figures usually quoted are 75% corn, 15% rye, and 10% barley, which the distillery has not confirmed.
Weller Full Proof
Award: Double Gold, 95 points
Tasting Notes: Vanilla, caramel, toasted oak, creme brulee
Find Your Next Bottle: $120 / £195
Full proof and barrel proof are not the same thing, which trips people up. Buffalo Trace fills its wheated bourbon barrels at 114 proof, and Weller Full Proof is bottled at that same strength rather than at whatever the barrel gives back after maturation.
Buffalo Trace announced the bottling in March 2019 for a June release. Kris Comstock, the distillery’s senior marketing director at the time, said that “bourbon drinkers are asking us for high proof and non-chill filtered bourbon more and more”, and that retailers and bar owners choosing Weller barrels had regularly asked for their whiskey to be left unfiltered.
There is no age statement, and it comes out once a year in limited quantities. The launch price was $49.99.
What the Results Tell Us
Six of the seven Double Gold bourbons come from Sazerac, divided between Buffalo Trace in Frankfort and Barton 1792 in Bardstown, with Jim Beam Lineage the only winner under different ownership. All seven scored within a single point of each other.
Getting hold of them is another matter. 1792 XV is currently GTR only, Lineage Batch #2 needs a trip to the distillery, and the four Buffalo Trace bottlings are allocated. Only 1792 Single Barrel is widely sold at retail price.
Have you tried any of these seven? Is there one you have been meaning to track down, or one you think the judges got wrong? And what do you make of the results overall? Let us know in the comments.
