King of Kentucky Bourbon Review (2022)

By Richard Thomas

Rating: A

Summertime had been a pretty sleepy season on the whiskey release calendar. Autumn is the time of year most of the exciting one-shot releases and fan favorite annual editions come out, running right up to Christmas. Springtime also has some buzz, especially in Europe. Perhaps because summer isn’t considered “whiskey drinking season” in most of the world, it’s generally been the low point.

Yet in recent years, some annual editions have come to be pegged to summer, probably because Autumn is so crowded. One such is King of Kentucky, now in its fifth year. This bourbon brand fell into a very not-royal state after the Second World War, becoming a cheap blended whiskey, and was discontinued in the late 1960s. In its revived state, it is a cask strength, single barrel annual series.

King of Kentucky 2022 is coming in two different batches. The first is the regular King of Kentucky release, a 15 year old bourbon bottled at 130.6 proof. The barrels pulled for this release yielded a combined 3,500 bottles. A second batch, labeled with gold trim, marks the 5th anniversary of the revived brand. This one is 18 years old, bottled at 130.3 proof, and had a production run of just 250 or so. The sample Brown-Forman sent me was of the regular, 15 year old version.

The Bourbon
A pour of the 15 year old King of Kentucky takes a deep, dark red cast of amber in the glass. This bourbon being over the 120 proof mark, I automatically added a splash of water, but dilution did little or nothing to the coloring.

This bourbon tells you right away it is richly endowed with both the sweet and spicy, delivering two viscous currents of aroma. One is loaded with sorghum, honey and barn tobacco. The other delivers earthy cocoa and hoary oak. On the nose, anyway, I wouldn’t call the dual nature of the bourbon “balanced.” It’s more like having two separate glasses before you. Each of those aspects is so hefty as to come upon you individually, not intertwined, or such was my experience of it.

Once the bourbon is on your tongue, it all comes together. It’s a dry bowel of oak, full of sorghum and topped with a vanilla drizzle, with raisins plus a mix of earthly Oreo cookie and cocoa powder stirred in. Every sip is just a belt of heavy bourbon sweetness, dry oak spiciness and an earthy grounding. The finish is not especially long, but it is distinguished in running earthy rather than spicy, because spicy and woody is how these things usually go.

The Price
The middle aged, 15 year old standard King of Kentucky 2022 is officially priced at $249.99, and I say if you see it on a shelf for that price, absolutely grab it. The market value for a 2021 bottling is currently running between $2,100 and $2,800. The older, anniversary version is priced at $349.99.