Top Picks Of 2024

We continue The Whiskey Reviewer‘s tradition of offering the staff’s Top Picks for the previous year, announced every year in early January. This is our informal version of an awards show in print, with an infamous on informal. We do not convene a panel, because that is too much of a bother! Instead, each member of the team may offer their separate and distinct opinion on any or all of three categories:

Best New Whiskey: This is self-explanatory, but will be explained anyway. This is the staffer’s pick for the best whiskey released in 2024.

Best To Pass My Lips: This was the best whiskey imbibed by the member of staff during 2024. The whiskey need not be new. It may overlap with Best New Whiskey, but in that event the above category should be filled by the runner-up.

Biggest Disappointment: This was the heaviest letdown of 2024 encountered by the staff member. It also need not be new.

Richard Thomas, Owner-Editor

Best New Whiskey: Angel’s Envy Cask Strength 2024
Angel’s Envy Cask Strength is a consistently good annual bottling, but this year Master Distiller Owen Martin decided to tinker with success, and I for one am glad he did. From its inception, the expression has been a cask strength, hand-selected take on the standard Angel’s Envy, a bourbon finished in Ruby Port pipes. For 2024, Martin decided to add some Tawny Port-finished bourbon into the batching. The result really took the expression up a notch. I have notes on the entire series and have written up all but the 2013 release for The Whiskey Reviewer, and this is my favorite yet, beating out even the original 2012 bottling.

Best To Pass My Lips: Michter’s 20 Year Old Bourbon 2022
In 2019, the 20 year old label of Michter’s Bourbon dropped the single barrel designation, acquiring the less specific (but still appropriate) “limited release” tag. The 2022 installment proves that alteration did nothing to change the quality of what is in the bottle. Indeed, if anything it’s a plus: you can now count on batching to ensure that each bottle is consistent. Single barrels are interesting and offer the consumer the thrill of having something that is nearly unique (if only slightly so), but when one pays a minimum of $1,200 a bottle to get it, it’s understandable that one might want to know for sure what is coming with that bottle. This one is richly aged while being far from over-oaked, making for a pour that just keeps on giving and giving, sip after sip.

Biggest Disappointment: Triple Dog Irish Whiskey
Although not terrible, Triple Dog was certainly unremarkable. Worse, it was overpriced. It should not be hard to find a better blended Irish whiskey for less money. The only excuse one has for picking up this underwhelming bottle is ignorance, so here I am to warn you again.

Kurt Maitland, Deputy Editor

Best New Whiskey: Glengoyne White Oak 24 Year Old Single Malt
Simply a great example of what happens when you take a whisky that has usually been found in Sherry Casks and do a long maturation in bourbon. Great taste and totally different animal.

Best To Pass My Lips: 3Rivers Bottling of Highland Park 24 Year Old Single Malt
This is always hard to select because forty whiskies could be in the mix in a given year. But I lean into recent feeling and pick one the releases I had at the end of the year: a 3Rivers bottling of a 24 year old Highland Park. The bottling shows off all of the qualities that made Highland Park one of my first loves in the world of Scotch.

Biggest Disappointment: American Big Whiskey Doing Single Malts
This is a broad brush tarring, but all of the big bourbon brands attempting to doing an American single malt disappointed me, and there was a lot more of that in 2024. All the big American distillers seem to want to avoid embracing the opportunity that American single malts presents. I imagine they will at some point, but for 2024 it was the major disappointment.

Randall H. Borkus, Senior Contributor

Best New Whiskey: Michter’s Toasted Barrel Finish Bourbon 2024
This one is amazing again.  The nose is full of toasted honey Caramel. The front and mid-palate are chock full of buttery caramel, French vanilla and butterscotch drizzle. And just a little water brings out sprinkles of toasted brown sugar cookie crumbs.  The mouth feel is warm, juicy and viscus. The finish is loaded with sweet, toasted oak, a hint of butterscotch and a dry nuttiness.  This is a worthy pour, and I have plenty of backup on my bar.  I so wish they’d make more of it! Pretty please Andrea?

Best To Pass My Lips: Longrow 21 Year Old Peated Single Malt
This was such an interesting year for me with lots of great whisky. For this category, I am compelled to give a shout out to the Preservation Distillery’s limited edition Believe 20 Year Old Kentucky bourbon and the Sazerac 18 year old rye.

Notwithstanding, the best whisky to pass my lips this year is Longrow 21 Year Old from Springbank Distillery in Campbeltown, Scotland. Longrow whisky’s heavy, smoky character is rumored to reflect the Campbeltown whisky style from its Victorian peak. Its flavor comes from the heavily-peated malted barley, and from Springbank’s direct-fired wash still, double-distilled and slow cooling through the spirit still’s worm tub. The malted barley is peated to 50-55 parts per million (ppm), which is much higher than the traditional 8-10 ppm of the Springbank expression. Longrow 21 year old is non-chill-filtered, free from added color and bottled at 46%.

The nose holds a solid hit of peat smoke, mocha, blackberry jelly and vanilla. The palate is rich, creamy and viscus with loads of mocha, citrus peel, coffee and a crisp apple sweetness. The finish is long and oily with a smoky citrus splash, touches of smoked pineapple and sea brininess. This is an excellent single malt that caught me off guard with its flavor complexity.  This whisky screamed I’ve arrived with the very first sip!

Biggest Disappointment: Kentucky Owl Batch 12 Bourbon
Kentucky Owl Batch 12 was a huge disappointment. Binny’s DSRP was $399.99 in Chicago, and no one bought it.  I believed I was lucky to find it on sale at $149.99, but I was mistaken about the lucky part. The flavor profile lacks any serious complexity which I became accustomed to when Dixon Dedman was at the helm with the early batches 1-10. Batch 12 is a NAS intermingling of 7 to 14-year-old bourbons blended with 4-year-old bourbons that drinks like a bottom shelf bottle. It’s great in a cocktail like an Old Fashioned. My brother Rick digs it with Coke over ice, which he would tell you is its best use as he laughs at me for buying it in the first place.

Andrew Graham, Contributor

Best New Whiskey: Woodinville Straight Bourbon Whiskey Aged 8 Years
When I first tasted Woodinville’s eight-year bourbon expression, released Sept.1, my immediate reaction was to wonder what the hell they’d done to this particular whiskey to make it so uniquely exceptional.

Well, it turns out that a lot of it is in the barrels. You can read the press release for all of the details, but in short, they used this long, drawn-out process and some chemistry to figure out which barrels were producing the best flavor compounds. They waited a long time and then bottled it, and that’s what this whiskey is.

The result is an expression that’s an absolute flavor bomb for bourbon fans. Vanilla, caramel, butterscotch, dark chocolate, cocoa powder, espresso: All those flavors are there, at the front of my palate, when I drink this stuff—and they’re cooperating, not competing with each other. Then there’s a quick wisp of mint on the finish. It is just outstanding.

This expression is 100 proof and has a high-rye mash bill of 55% corn, 35% rye, and 10% malted barley, a bit spicier than the mash of the distiller’s flagship bourbon, which is 72% corn, 22% rye, and 6% malted barley.

Best To Pass My Lips: Shenk’s Homestead Sour Mash Whiskey 2020
For 2025, I resolve to get more into the American single malts, which is finally a real thing in the eyes of the law. (This category has been growing steadily for awhile. But, domestically, it will explode bigly in the likely scenario that there are more import taxes put on Scotch whiskies.)

However, for this year’s best-of, I’m going to stick with what I know best, and what I know best is bourbon. The best whiskey to pass my lips this year was the 2020 release of Michter’s Shenk’s expression.

Most Michter’s expressions give my palate a dusty, umami-rich funk, kind of like how a touch of truffle oil will add a lot of earth and musk to a dish. To me, this quality is uniquely Michter’s; no other distiller I’ve ever had can replicate it.

This expression has that in droves, as if they could add an extra dash of that unique flavor in just for good measure. Beyond that, my palate picked up notes of vanilla extract (rich sweetness balanced with a nuttiness), and then baking spice and eventually mint, almost as if they’d married the best parts of Michter’s bourbon and its rye.

It is exceptionally smooth and tannic, and the finish is longer and stickier than the relatively modest proofing of 45.6% ABV may imply.

Michter’s is famously cagey about their mash bills and age statements, and there are two ways to respond to that. One way is to just not care—they make great stuff consistently; just leave them alone about it and let them cook.

The other way is to wonder about it, and this expression does make me wonder about it. I suspect it is a young-ish whiskey with an old soul. An example of exactly how exceptional a relatively young sour-mash bourbon can be.

David Levine, Contributor

Best New Whiskey 2024: Copperworks Release #49 Fritz Pale Malt
I gave my highest rating of the year to Russell’s Reserve 15 Year Old, and it’s hard to argue against it being the best thing I tasted as a new release in 2024… but just to be contrarian (while acknowledging how great the RR15 was) I’m going to say the best new release I had in 2024 was the Copperworks Release #49 Fritz Pale Malt.

It was an incredibly complex single malt from brewers-turned-distillers that explored the grain in a thoroughly intentional way. The Copperworks team knew what they wanted to achieve, and they did it. I love that. I love successful intentionality. Only about 5% of things I taste throughout the year rate above an 8/10 on my scale – other highly rated (8+) releases this year showcased top-quality blending, single barrel selection, and long-term maturation. None, however, demonstrated the step-by-step, grain-to-glass-to-lips meticulousness and success therein than Copperworks’ release.

Best To Pass My Lips: Michter’s 25 Year Old Bourbon 2023
This was just f***ing brilliant. I don’t know how Michter’s manages to find these few barrels at this age that aren’t oak concentrate, but they do it. I have my suspicions that they have a “skillful chill filtration” technique that minimizes tannins and oakiness, and I don’t care. If they use it to make a 25-year old American whiskey of any type just the tiniest bit palatable, let alone mind-blowing, may they find 50 barrels a year of this stuff. It’s a testament to Willie Pratt’s vision and Dan McKee and Andrea Wilson’s ability to bring that vision to fruition whenever possible. And thank you to a fellow writer on this site for generously providing from his own bottle for me to taste. I tasted this in the beginning of February and nothing throughout the year – not even Russell’s Reserve 15 YO – came remotely close. Now to just find an oz of that 25 year old rye to taste….

Biggest Disappointment (Including a Special Rant!): Sazerac Traveller Whiskey
I’m going to split my vote here and give a biggest disappointment for a specific product then one for the industry.

Product-wise, the big letdown was Sazerac’s Traveller Whiskey, bar none. I got blowback for calling this out in early February, but I stand by my reasoning. Sazerac made a huge deal about this being a simultaneously premium whiskey (the 40^th blend out of 50+ tasted, chosen as the best by Harlen Wheatley and Chris Stapleton) and a low-priced, widely available one (~$40 and found pretty much anywhere). So, it’s a low-priced premium whiskey that’s easily findable… what? Add in the botched rollout about whether Stapleton was sober, sober-ish, drinking in moderation, etc. while choosing a whiskey to bear his name, and this was an absolute mess. Finally, if they tasted over 50 blends and this was genuinely their top one, I seriously worry about the palates of every person involved in that decision.

OK, special rant time. Industry-wise, my biggest disappointment is the lack of effort (perceived or real) in big brand tasting notes. It’s not new, by any means, but I feel like this year hit peak laziness. Booker’s and Little Book made some of my favorite bourbons this year, yet the bland, quotidian, unspecific tasting notes from batch to batch were at best uninspiring and at worst (Little Book The Infinite) insulting. Lest someone think I’m singling out Beam-Suntory, the same goes for descriptions of Stagg no-longer-Jr, Elijah Craig Barrel Proof and Larceny Barrel Proof batches, Old Fitzgerald editions, and many others from heritage and large brands that would simply belabor the point. To make this more salient, let’s just focus on the batched products. Simply put, if you’re putting out a batched product, the idea assumedly is that each batch is singular, is saying something, has a point that in some way differentiates it from the others, be it two three or four batches per year. What made ECBP A124, B524, and C924 different from each other? They all tasted different and had different ages, but why? Same for Larceny, Old Fitz, and Booker’s. Changing age statements and proofs does make them “different,” but I’m expecting a purpose. Just batching for the sake of some person trying to “collect them all” Pokémon-style is boring. And for Booker’s, if you’re going to go through the trouble of naming the batches (a tradition I rather enjoy), connect the story and the product and the tasting notes in some way. Calling 2024-04 Jimmy’s Batch in honor of Jimmy Russell is a lovely tribute but tell me more. Was the date significant? Were you aiming for a Wild Turkey-like profile? Was there some meaning to the naming other than just slapping his name on it? Embrace purpose. Embrace intentionality. Embrace thought transparency. Embrace the effort required to make these things special. If I’m paying $75-$150 for these “premium”, special releases, make me feel special for buying them, like you put the same effort in that makes it worth my while to buy and appreciate.