The Best Bourbon Under $15 — The ABV Network

ABV Network Project:

The Best Bourbon Under $15

Since the start of the global pandemic, we’ve hosted a variety of virtual events on Zoom. We’re talking tastings, interviews of people in the bourbon industry, a cocktail class featuring Molly Wellmann, a concert by Bernie Lubbers, and much more. It’s been a very welcome way to still get together and have some fun and I’ve found the only constraints we have are our lack of creativity. We work hard to try to push ourselves to continue to re-invent what we do on our virtual events.

One that we just completed was totally different than anything we’ve done to do. It was a project that was broken into three parts over three months. Our goal was to definitively find the best bourbon out there under $15.

Bourbon under $15 is a tough category. There aren’t a whole lot of options, and many of them you do find are pretty rough… cocktail bourbons at best. Our challenge was to find the “best of the best” in one that you could enjoy sipping as well as standing up in your favorite cocktail.

After consulting with some people I respect that wouldn’t be involved in the project, I developed a list of 12 bourbons. I then randomly broke them up into groups of six. Our project team would receive two mailings of six bourbons. In the first session, we would sample the first group of six and eliminate three from the completion. The other three would move to the finals. The second session was exactly the same approach. Six different bourbons with three being eliminated and three going to the finals.

In our final round, we then ranked those final six leading us to declare the best bourbon under $15.

We did several things to ensure a fair take on this process:

1). Everything was done blind. The participants got no information on these bourbons at all. They didn’t get age, proof, brand, etc. They simply got sample bottles of bourbon with a letter on it.

2). The goal of participants in each session was to sample all six offerings and then rank them 1 (favorite) to 6 (least favorite). We then used a reverse scoring system giving 6 points to the one ranked 1st (the favorite), 5 points to the second favorite, etc. This allowed us to rank the bourbons based on the overall taste from the group. This was used for elimination from the contest, moving on to the next round and to the final six ranking.

3). We changed the letters identifying the sample bottles for the final round. We didn’t want someone thinking, “I liked G best the first time we did this, so that’s my favorite this round as well.” Instead, they finalists all had different letters assigned.

I believe these three factors allowed us to create a totally unbiased list. Best of all, we literally had a ranking from 12 down to 1 after the first two rounds since every bourbon was scored. The final round would be a second chance to start with a. clean slate for the final six, but guess what happened? The final six rankings did not change… not one shift in any of the rankings. They literally stayed the same which leads me to draw the conclusion we got it right.

With that being said, here’s a look at our rankings from 12 (least favorite) down to 1 (our favorite and the one we declare the “Best Bourbon Under $15):

12. Zackariah Harris

11. Ezra Brooks

10. Old Crow

9. Cabin Still

8. Ancient Age

7. Henry McKenna (80 proof)

————————- FINALISTS —————————-

6. Kentucky Tavern

5. Old Charter

4. JTS Brown Bottled-in-Bond

3. Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond

2. JW Dant Bottled-in-Bond

1. Very Old Barton 100-Proof

Congrats to the champ! The Best Bourbon Under $15 as declared by the ABV Network!

This was a fun project to be a part of. We are planning on doing this again next year with Bottled-in-Bond offerings as we look to declare the best Bottled-in-Bond bourbon. Follow along all of our events by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3dUgWDe