Pursuit United Rye Review
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Quick Facts
Is This For Me?
You are a bourbon drinker curious about rye — this was engineered for exactly that, and reviewers say so almost unanimously. You want sweetness and spice in the same glass rather than a one-note spice bomb. And you value transparency: the label names both source distilleries, all three mash bills and the batch code, which is rarer than it should be.
You want the dill-and-caraway signature of a classic Maryland or MGP rye — neither descriptor appears in a single one of our eleven sources. You want batch-to-batch consistency: the blend recipe has genuinely changed between releases. Or you want easy availability, which this no longer has.
Flavor Profile at a Glance
What It Tastes Like
Nose
Brown sugar leads, wrapped in baking spice and cinnamon, with green apple, a cool thread of mint, soft vanilla and a lift of citrus peel.
Palate
Rye spice arrives first and stays, over toasted oak, burnt caramel and more brown sugar, with black pepper and clove sharpening the edges.
Finish
Medium-long and warming. Clove and black pepper build against lingering caramel, with toasted oak and dry rye spice closing it out.
Best Ways to Enjoy
Neat
Genuinely easy for 108 proof. Reviewers repeatedly call it “surprisingly easy drinking” and “proofed just right” — the corn-heavy component does real work here.
With Water
A few drops open the citrus and mint on the nose. Go further and you start to lose the viscous mouthfeel that several reviewers single out as a strength.
On Ice
Holds up well. At 54% ABV there is enough body to survive dilution, and the chill pushes the apple and citrus forward.
Cocktail
Excellent. Proof and sweetness both sit where a stirred drink wants them, and the spice survives vermouth and bitters intact.
Cocktail Scores
Price & Value
At sixty-five to seventy dollars you are paying for blending rather than branding, and for whiskey that is genuinely four to seven years old from two named distilleries. That is a fair deal on paper, and most reviewers agreed — “value” shows up in the plus column repeatedly. The complication is availability: the 108-proof bottling has been pushed to gift-shop-only distribution, which means the price you see is increasingly whatever the remaining channel stock asks rather than a stable shelf price. Pay MSRP if you can find it, walk away well north of that, and compare against the rest of our mid-priced rye whiskey collection before you stretch.
Bottle Transparency
- ProducerPursuit Spirits, LLC, 722 W. Main Street, Louisville, Kentucky. Founded 2018 by Kenny Coleman and Ryan Cecil of the Bourbon Pursuit podcast. A non-distilling producer — Pursuit blends, it does not distil this whiskey.
- DistilleriesBardstown Bourbon Company (Kentucky) and Sagamore Spirit (Maryland). Both named on the label — unusually candid for a sourced blend.
- Mash billsThree, all disclosed: Bardstown 95% rye / 5% malted barley; Sagamore 95% rye / 5% malted barley; Sagamore 52% rye / 43% corn / 5% malted barley. The blending percentages are not disclosed.
- AgeNo age statement. Pursuit states components run four to seven years old. For the first batch, Malt Review was told the youngest was three years eight months and the oldest four years seven months.
- BatchingEvery bottle carries a batch code (7CC, 10CF and so on). Batch 1 was nine barrels and 2,076 bottles; the brand has scaled up substantially since. The blend recipe is not fixed between batches.
- FiltrationNon-chill filtered for the original release, as stated in the launch press materials. Pursuit does not publish a current filtration statement for later batches.
- AvailabilityPursuit’s own product page for the 108 currently marks it “Gift Shop Only.” The 88-proof and Barrel Proof siblings carry the general distribution.
Full Review: Pursuit United Rye
Kenny Coleman and Ryan Cecil spent years interviewing distillers on the Bourbon Pursuit podcast before deciding to make whiskey themselves. What they built is not a distillery — it is a blending house, and Pursuit United Rye is the clearest statement of what that means. Three rye whiskeys, three mash bills, two distilleries, two states, one bottle, and all of it printed on the label. In a category where “sourced” is usually a word brands work hard to avoid saying, that candour is the first thing worth noting.
The Blend Is the Whole Point
Eighty per cent of American rye on shelves today comes from a single Indiana factory, and Pursuit deliberately went elsewhere. Two of the three components are 95% rye and 5% malted barley — one from Bardstown Bourbon Company in Kentucky, one from Sagamore Spirit in Maryland. The third, also Sagamore, is a 52% rye with 43% corn, the old “barely legal” Baltimore style. Cecil has said publicly that the 108-proof blend leans on that corn-heavy component precisely because it makes a high-proof rye approachable. Every reviewer who tasted this blind-ish arrived at the same phrase independently: a bourbon drinker’s rye.
That is worth taking seriously as a description rather than a compliment or an insult. If you have come looking for the MGP 95/5 profile that defines the modern rye shelf — sharp dill, hard pepper, cool mint — this is not it, and our Bulleit 95 Rye page is the better starting point. Dill does not appear in a single one of our eleven sources. Neither does caraway. On an American rye that is a genuine absence, not an oversight, and it tells you exactly which direction this blend was pointed.
What the Batches Actually Change
This is where buyers get caught. Pursuit batches this whiskey and prints the code on the bottle, which is admirable, but the recipe genuinely moves. Breaking Bourbon reviewed the first release and then Batch 7CC and found that 7CC had dropped one of the two 95/5 components altogether. Their read on the difference is consistent with the rest of our pool: the first batch reads fruitier and easier, later batches read spicier and bolder. The one thing that has not moved is proof — every batch of this expression is 108. Our tasting notes lean on the common ground across batches, and if you want a rye that tastes identical every time, Wild Turkey Rare Breed Rye is the more predictable pour at a similar intensity.
The Availability Problem
In 2025 Pursuit redesigned the whole United line and added two new proof points: an 88-proof version at around forty dollars and a Barrel Proof that has run as high as 121.8. All three now say “Triple Batch Rye” on the front, and all three use the same three mash bills in different proportions. In the reshuffle the 108 — the original, the one that won Double Gold at San Francisco and Platinum at ASCOT, the one every review in our pool is actually about — was moved to gift-shop-only distribution. It is still findable online while channel stock lasts. It is no longer a bottle you will stumble across in a shop, and that is a real mark against recommending it without qualification.
Our Verdict
A well-made, genuinely transparent, unusually well-balanced blend that does what it set out to do: give a bourbon palate a rye it can enjoy at full strength. The sweetness is real, the spice is real, and at 108 proof it manages both without heat getting in the way. It is not a rye purist’s rye, it is not consistent between batches, and it is now awkward to buy — three caveats that keep it short of a blanket recommendation. If the profile appeals but you want something you can actually find, New Riff Bottled in Bond Rye covers similar ground with steadier supply.
Community Tasting Notes
Read this figure carefully. It rests on eleven independent published reviews and essentially no crowd pool — we could not verify a single named consumer rating count for this bottle anywhere, which is unusual and is itself a finding about how limited its distribution has been. Drop the most generous source and the score barely moves, so the pool is tight. It is also uniformly positive: no reviewer we found disliked it, and the spread is driven more by how different outlets scale their scores than by disagreement about the whiskey.
Top Reported Flavors
Rating Distribution
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Pros & Cons
Pros
- Exceptional transparency — both distilleries, all three mash bills and the batch code on the label
- Balances sweetness and rye spice unusually well; every source lands on the same read
- Drinks far easier than 108 proof suggests, with real viscous body behind it
- Not MGP — a genuinely different profile from the rye that dominates the shelf
- Components are four to seven years old, not a young sourced blend
- Double Gold at San Francisco World Spirits and Platinum at the ASCOT Awards
Cons
- Now gift-shop-only from the brand — increasingly hard to buy at a sane price
- The blend recipe changes between batches; Batch 7CC dropped a whole component
- No dill, no caraway — rye traditionalists will find it tame
- Easy to confuse on the shelf with the 88-proof and Barrel Proof siblings
- Blending percentages are not disclosed, only the mash bills themselves
- Almost no verified consumer rating pool exists to check the critics against
Frequently Asked Questions
❓ What proof is Pursuit United Rye?
❓ Who distills Pursuit United Rye?
❓ What is the mash bill?
❓ How old is Pursuit United Rye?
❓ Does it taste like a typical rye whiskey?
❓ Do the batches taste different?
❓ Is Pursuit United Rye still available?
Quality You Can Trust
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