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The 25 Most Important Bourbons Ever Made

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Nelom started a discussion

Food & Wine has a pretty interesting article/list up on their site in which they've consulted with a veritable who's-who of bourbon experts in order to create a list of the most important bourbons. Note that that doesn't mean 'best', but rather which bourbons has done the most for the growth and welfare of the bourbon industry.

It's a pretty good list that at least I find it hard to have any big disagreements with, other than perhaps the specific numerical placement of a couple of entries. It's also educational, in that each entry on the list is given a motivating blurb that contains some history that you may not have known before.

Before I provide the link, allow me a brief quote from the article to set the scene:

...thanks to a boom that shifted into high gear around the turn of the century, bourbon is arguably the most talked-about, most obsessed-over and most in-demand spirit in the world. To better assess how we got here, we consulted with 23 bourbon experts, including distillers, journalists, authors, whiskey-bar owners and one whiskey-centric-liquor-store proprietor.

Each participant named five to ten bourbons that made a difference—not their favorite bourbons, or the ones they thought tasted best, but those bottles that were influential, innovative or otherwise held a significant place in bourbon history.

There's a full list of their panelists at the bottom of the article. Speaking of which, here's that link:

foodandwine.com/cocktails-spirits/…

8 years ago

6 replies

Nelom replied

Whisky writer Chuck Cowdery was one of the panelists that contributed to the above linked list, and he's written a blog post where he expresses his disappointment with the final result. To a certain extent I can see where he's coming from, but I don't fully agree with him.

Considering the methodology used by Food & Wine it's not at all surprising that the list looks like it does. The only way for historical and now obscure bourbons to make the list, would be if these panelists had sat down and debated amongst each other, making a case for why a particular bourbon deserves to be on the list. But since Food & Wine were basically doing a popular vote sort of a tally, the list he envisioned was simply never going to happen.

That said, if you enjoyed the list (and maybe more so if you didn't) I think Cowdery's blog post is worth a read as well: chuckcowdery.blogspot.ca/2017/06/…

8 years ago 0

Victor replied

@Nelom, what you say sounds about right. As to Chuck Cowdery, he is always worth reading. Promotion and braggadocio are so much a part of the whisk(e)y world that it is always refreshing to read someone who is absolutely no BS.

8 years ago 1Who liked this?