The American Distilling Institute’s International Spirits Competition wrapped up its newest edition in May 2026, and the Indian single malt results are worth a look. Paul John took five medals, including the top prize of the whole competition, and Indri picked up a Double Gold for its first peated release.
The ADI competition has been running since 2007 and is judged blind by a panel of industry professionals. It is one of the more craft-focused spirits competitions out there.
The bigger picture matters too. Indian single malts outsold imported Scotch single malt in India for the first time in 2024, and a lot of that comes down to climate. India’s tropical maturation pulls roughly 10 to 12% of each cask to the angels every year, compared to around 2% in Scotland, which means a four to six year old Indian whisky can carry the depth of something much older from a cooler climate.
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Here are the winning Indian single malts from the ADI International Spirits Competition 2026.
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Paul John Classic Select Cask
Awards: Best of Class, Best of Category, Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Fruit, malted barley, manuka honey-liquorice, toasted honeycomb, demerara sugar
Every Kirkland Bourbon Ranked, From Worst to Best
READ THE STORYFind Your Next Bottle: $116 / £65 / ₹7,921
This is the headline of the whole list. Best of Class is the top trophy at ADI, and this is the bottle that took it.
Classic Select Cask is unpeated, bottled at cask strength of 55.2% ABV, and matured for around five to six years in selected ex-bourbon barrels at the Paul John Distillery in Goa. It is non-chill-filtered, with no added colour, and released in small batches.
John Distilleries was founded in 1992, with the first casks laid down at the distillery in Goa in 2008. Since then, Paul John has expanded rapidly, with expressions now readily available in a wide range of countries.
The distillery sits in a tropical west-coast climate and works with six-row Indian barley grown in the Himalayan foothills, fermenting to a low wash strength of around 5% ABV that gives the spirit a sweeter, more honeyed character before it ever sees a cask.
Master Distiller Michael D’Souza, recently named World’s Best Master Distiller / Blender at the 2026 World Whiskies Awards, has said that four to five years of Goa maturation gets you somewhere close to fifteen years of Scottish maturation.
Paul John Brilliance
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes: Demerara sugar, cinnamon, honey, spice, cocoa, vanilla
Find Your Next Bottle: $69 / £40 / ₹3,600
Brilliance is the flagship of the Paul John core range, and the bottle most people meet the brand through. It is bottled at 46% ABV, non-chill-filtered, and matured for around six years exclusively in first-fill American ex-bourbon casks. No sherry, no wine, no finishing. It is built to show what Goa does to bourbon-cask maturation on its own terms.
Following Paul John’s launch in London in October 2012, Brilliance arrived as part of the original core range the following year.
It is worth noting too that Sazerac, the New Orleans group behind Buffalo Trace, has been progressively building a controlling stake in John Distilleries since 2017, and now holds somewhere around 60%.
Indri Agneya
Awards: Double Gold Medal
Tasting Notes:
Find Your Next Bottle: $66 / £48 / ₹6,806
The only non-Paul John whisky on the list.
Indri sits around 1,500 miles north of Goa in Haryana, near the Himalayan foothills, where summers hit 50°C and winters drop close to freezing. Master Blender Surrinder Kumar explained to me that those extremes accelerate maturation as the wood expands and contracts, pulling the spirit deeper into the cask and producing whiskies with richer textures, bolder flavors, and greater depth.
Agneya is Indri’s first peated release. Lightly peated six-row Indian barley sourced from family farmers in Bundi, Rajasthan, double-distilled, then matured in a combination of ex-bourbon and Pedro Ximénez sherry casks. Bottled at 46% ABV. The name comes from the Sanskrit for “belonging to fire.”
Surrinder Kumar spent the bulk of his career at Amrut, where he helped build that distillery’s single malt programme, before joining Piccadily to develop Indri. His arrival is a big part of why Indri arrived on the global stage as quickly as it did.
Paul John Bold
Awards: Gold Medal
Tasting Notes:
Find Your Next Bottle: $69 / £40 / ₹4,115
Bold is the peated counterpart to Brilliance. Same six-row Indian barley from the Himalayan foothills, same maturation in first-fill American ex-bourbon casks at the Goa distillery, but built around imported peat from Islay and Aberdeen. Bottled at 46% ABV, non-chill-filtered, with no age statement.
Peat is the one non-Indian raw material in the Paul John process. Everything else, from the barley to the water to the copper pot stills, is local.
Bold was part of the Paul John core range launched in May 2013, alongside Brilliance and Edited, and it has been the brand’s house peated expression ever since. It picked up Double Gold at the 2018 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and the ADI 2026 Gold continues that run.
Paul John Nirvana
Awards: Gold Medal
Tasting Notes:
Find Your Next Bottle: $37 / £33 / ₹1,850
Nirvana is the entry-level expression in the Paul John core range, launched in 2019 to bring new drinkers into the category. Bottled at 40% ABV, made from the same six-row Indian barley as the rest of the range, and reportedly matured for a minimum of three years in American oak ex-bourbon casks at the Goa distillery.
Founder Paul P. John framed it at launch as a whisky “for those willing and keen to experience single malts, especially for the first time.”
It is also worth flagging that Nirvana is the most accessibly priced bottle on this list by some distance, and ADI judges its categories blind. So this is a sub-$35 whisky picking up a Gold against entries several times its price.
Paul John Peated Select Cask
Awards: Gold Medal
Tasting Notes:
Find Your Next Bottle: $116 / £63 / ₹6,445
Peated Select Cask is the peated sibling of the Best of Class winner. Same Select Cask programme, same small-batch approach at the Goa distillery, but built around imported peat from Islay and Aberdeen rather than unpeated barley.
Bottled at cask strength of 55.5% ABV, matured for around five to six years in first-fill American ex-bourbon barrels, made from six-row Indian barley, non-chill-filtered, with no added colour.
It is the second of the two Select Cask expressions to win at ADI 2026. Between this and Classic Select Cask, Paul John has now landed both the peated and unpeated versions of its top-tier programme at the same competition, which is the headline behind the headline.
India’s Quiet Takeover
Paul John taking five of the six is a story about one distillery operating at the top of its game across an entire range, from the entry-level Nirvana to the cask-strength Select Cask expressions. Winning at both the cheapest and most expensive ends of its lineup, in both peated and unpeated styles, is impressive.
Indri’s Double Gold for Agneya is the other half of the story. A peated whisky from a continental Himalayan climate that has very little in common with Goa’s coastal humidity, picked up by the same panel that handed Paul John its five.
These two producers, however, hardly tell the whole story. Brands like Amrut, Rampur, Godawan, and Indri’s own Trini and Diwali Collector’s Edition are not on this list, and the wider category is bigger than one competition can capture.
Have you tried any of the bottles on this list, or is there an Indian single malt you think the ADI judges missed? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
