Bardstown Double Barreled Rye Review

Bardstown Bourbon Company spent its first years as the distillery other people's whiskey came from. It opened in 2016, built a contract-distilling business supplying dozens of brands, and sold its own bottles as blends of sourced stock under the Fusion and Discovery labels. The Origin Series — now simply the core line — was the moment that stopped. This rye is the first one they distilled, aged and bottled entirely themselves, and it is the most interesting bottle of the three they launched with.

The Zebra Barrel

The mash bill is the famous one: 95% rye, 5% malted barley, the recipe that made MGP's Indiana rye the default flavour of the American rye revival. Choosing it was a conservative move, and at least one reviewer said so bluntly — he wanted to taste Bardstown's 95/5 unadorned, side by side with the dozen others on his shelf, and felt the finishing robbed him of that comparison. If you want the unfinished benchmark, Redemption Straight Rye is the cleanest version of that recipe.

What Bardstown did instead was build a barrel. Working with West Virginia Great Barrel Company, they made a finishing cask of alternating staves — one light-toasted cherry wood, one medium-toasted cherry wood, one American oak, repeated all the way round. The toast is done with infrared light over about fifteen minutes instead of an open flame over seconds, which gives an even toast with fewer harsh tannins. The six-year-old rye goes into that for up to six months. It is a genuinely novel piece of cooperage rather than a wine cask bought cheap, and it shows in the glass.

Loud, Herbal, and Divisive

The dominant finding across our sources is that this tastes emphatically, unmistakably of rye. One reviewer's summary was simply "it's all rye and nothing else, literally nothing else." Pepper and clove lead, with evergreen, fennel, anise and caraway filling in — and, unusually for a modern rye, dill is genuinely present rather than absent, named by the brand, by Distiller's expert taster and by an independent blogger who read it off the palate.

That herbal-menthol streak is also where the bottle divides people, and the split is visible in the numbers. Two of the lowest community scores on Distiller name it explicitly — one reviewer wrote that there was "too much herbal winter green mint spice" for his palate while conceding it was good whiskey. If spearmint and wintergreen in a rye read as refreshing to you, this is a strength. If they read as toothpaste, no amount of cherry wood will fix it. For a high-rye Kentucky bottle without that character, New Riff Bottled-in-Bond goes in a very different direction at a similar strength.

What the Cherry Wood Actually Does

Two things, consistently. It puts cherry everywhere — seven of our twelve sources find it, in forms ranging from tart and sour through candied to Bing — and it lays down far more vanilla than a rye usually carries. One reviewer called the toast "a vanilla bomb element that is somewhat unique in a rye," and he is right: the sweetness here is wood sweetness, not grain sweetness, and it sits on top of the spice rather than dissolving into it. Whether that reads as complexity or as two whiskeys talking over each other is the one thing our reviewers genuinely could not agree on. You can compare the rest of the category in our finished rye whiskey collection.

Where It Falls Down

Cocktails. The most methodical tester we found ran it through an Old Fashioned and a mule and reported that Angostura bitters caused the whole profile to fold, that walnut bitters barely helped, and that in the mule he could taste nothing but ginger beer. That is a striking result for a 96-proof 95% rye, and it sits awkwardly against the brand's own marketing line about classic cocktails. The other recurring criticism is linearity: two separate outlets said the finish introduced nothing the palate had not already delivered.

Our Verdict

A confident, distinctive, properly rye-forward whiskey with a real idea behind it — and at its current fifty-dollar price, the value objection that dogged it at launch has largely evaporated. Buy it to sip neat, buy it if the herbal end of rye appeals, and do not buy it as your mixing bottle. If what you actually want is a bruising classic rye for the same money, Pikesville 110 is the more conventional answer.