After what feels like a lifetime of waiting, the International Whisky Competition has finally released its 2026 results. The competition is a blind-tasting contest, which means the judges score each whiskey without knowing its brand, country of origin, or strength. Every entry is assessed across 15 criteria on a 100-point scale, and this year’s results were released on July 7, 2026.
We’ve already looked at the top five overall, so now we’re turning to the bourbon categories specifically. Five bourbons took the top titles, and all of them come from distilleries owned by Sazerac, namely Buffalo Trace in Kentucky, A. Smith Bowman in Virginia, and Barton 1792 in Kentucky. One of them, A. Smith Bowman Cask Strength Batch #5, went further and won three separate bourbon titles.
So, let’s take a look at the winners of each bourbon category at the International Whisky Competition 2026.
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A. Smith Bowman Cask Strength (Batch #5)
Award: 1st Place, Best Bourbon Whiskey, Best Bourbon Whiskey – Cask Strength, Best Bourbon Whiskey – Small Batch, 94. 60 points
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Tasting Notes: Candied apples, smoke, ripe plums, cherries, sweet florals
Find Your Next Bottle: N/A
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Batch #5 took three bourbon titles at once and posted the highest score of any American whiskey in this year’s competition, placing third overall. The distillery behind it has a long history in Virginia. A. Smith Bowman was founded in 1934 by Abram Smith Bowman and his sons, moved to its current site in Fredericksburg in 1988, and has been owned by Sazerac since 2003.
It is often described as the sister distillery to Buffalo Trace, also owned by Sazerac, and the spirit in the Bowman bourbons is reportedly first distilled at Buffalo Trace or another Sazerac distillery before being shipped to Virginia and distilled again at Bowman. Its two stills are named George and Mary.
The Cask Strength line has been an annual release since 2021, and Batch #4 won the overall bourbon category at the 2025 IWC. This release is aged for a minimum of 10 years and bottled at 137.6 proof.
William Larue Weller 2025
Award: 1st Place, Best Bourbon Whiskey – Wheated, 91.73 points
Tasting Notes: Vanilla, maple, leather, tobacco, oak, ripe fruit
Find Your Next Bottle: $1,800 / £1,440
William Larue Weller is a wheated bourbon, which means wheat is used as the secondary grain in place of rye. This bottling is part of the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, a set of six whiskeys the distillery releases in limited quantities each fall.
The bottling is named after W.L. Weller, a 19th-century distiller who helped introduce wheat into the bourbon mash bill.
The 2025 release was distilled in December 2010, January 2011, and January 2013, and it is 12 years and 7 months old at bottling. It went into the barrel at 114 proof and was bottled at 129 proof, uncut and unfiltered. It is one of the harder bourbons on this list to find, with a suggested retail price of around $150 and secondary market prices that run considerably higher.
I was lucky enough to taste this bourbon at the BTAC 2025 launch event last year. You can read my tasting notes for each whiskey in the collection here.
Eagle Rare 17 Year Old 2025
Award: 1st Place, Best Bourbon Whiskey – 10 Years and Older, 91.30 points
Tasting Notes: Dark tobacco, leather, ripe cherry, pepper, caramel, vanilla
Find Your Next Bottle: $1,880 / £1,504
Eagle Rare 17 is the older, limited counterpart to Buffalo Trace’s core Eagle Rare bourbon, and it is part of the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection. It is produced at Buffalo Trace Distillery in Franklin County, Kentucky.
Despite the 17-year age statement, the 2025 release was distilled in spring 2007 and is 18 years and 4 months old at bottling, bottled at 101 proof. It is made from the distillery’s low-rye recipe of corn, rye, and malted barley, double distilled and aged in new white oak barrels with a number 4 char. The whiskey went into the barrel at 125 proof, and 89% of the original spirit was lost to evaporation over its time in the warehouse.
Suggested retail is around $150, though it is heavily allocated and sells for much more in practice.
This was my favorite of the BTAC bunch in 2025, so I have to say I agree with the judges here.
John J. Bowman – Single Barrel
Award: 1st Place, Best Bourbon Whiskey – Single Barrel, 91.70 points
Tasting Notes: Toffee, leather, figs, almonds
Find Your Next Bottle: $59.99
This is the second A. Smith Bowman bourbon on the list, from the same Virginia distillery behind the Cask Strength winner.
As a single barrel bourbon, each bottle is drawn from one individual cask, so there is some natural variation from bottle to bottle. It is named after John J. Bowman, an ancestor of the distillery’s founder, and is bottled at 100 proof.
Like the other Bowman bourbons, the spirit is reportedly first distilled at another Sazerac facility before being finished at Bowman in Virginia. It was named World’s Best Bourbon at the 2017 World Whiskies Awards, and it is the more widely available of the two Bowman bottles here.
Early Times Bottled-in-Bond
Award: 1st Place, Best Bourbon Whiskey – Bottled-in-Bond, 89.33 points
Tasting Notes: Caramel, candy corn, vanilla, oak, spice, brown sugar
Find Your Next Bottle: $22 / £18
Early Times is one of the oldest names on this list, with roots dating back to 1860. The brand was owned by Brown-Forman for many years before Sazerac bought it in 2020, with production later moving to the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky.
Being bottled in bond, it is the product of one distilling season, aged for at least four years, and bottled at 100 proof. It is made from a high-corn mash bill of 79% corn, 11% rye, and 10% malted barley.
Of the five bourbons here, this is by far the easiest to buy and the most affordable, with the one-liter bottle generally selling for $25 to $30, against the roughly $150 retail and much higher secondary prices of the two Antique Collection bottles.
A Sazerac Sweep
One thing stands out across these five winners: every one of them comes from a distillery owned by Sazerac. The range within that is wide, though, running from a bonded bourbon you can pick up for under $30 to Antique Collection bottles that are hard to find and expensive when you do.
Because the International Whisky Competition is judged blind, the panel scored each of these without knowing the brand, the price, or where it came from, which is worth keeping in mind when a $25 bourbon and a heavily allocated one end up winning their categories at the same competition. It is also worth noting that Sazerac appears to enter a good number of its products across the competition.
Have you tried any of these? Are there any you’d like to? And what do you make of this year’s bourbon results? Let us know.
