Taste Test: Redemption’s New 18-Year-Old Bourbon Is Better Than Pappy 23

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

While older bourbon isn’t always great bourbon, some of the most highly sought after bottles have pretty lengthy age statements—Pappy Van Winkle 15, 20, and 23, for example. Those bourbons are very good, and sometimes great, but the older expressions tend to veer into overly oaky territory. That is not the case at all, however, with the new Redemption 18-Year-Old Bourbon, a whiskey that sits right in the middle of those older Pappys in terms of age—and is arguably as good or even better than any of them.

Redemption was founded in 2010, and initially the brand’s focus was on rye whiskey. That changed over time, as did the shape and design of the bottles, and the brand was acquired by Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits in 2015. Alan Kennedy became master blender in 2023, and he has done a fantastic job stewarding the brand and blending barrels of sourced whiskey, most of which come from Indiana distillery MGP—which is what’s in this new bottle. This is not the first older whiskey Redemption has released—there was an 18-year-old rye whiskey that came out a few years ago, and then there was the 36-year-old bourbon. Let’s talk about that whiskey for a moment. Thirty-six years is a very, very long time for bourbon to spend inside a barrel—much too long, as it turns out (to no one’s surprise). Redemption 36 had a $1,200 price tag when it debuted in 2017, and a bottle recently sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $18,000. I had a chance to try this bourbon when it first dropped, and it was… not good. A sip was like sucking on wet, bitter wood with a dash of vanilla desperately trying to fight through the tannins (some people from the brand would not disagree with this assessment).

That bottle was clearly an attempt at manufacturing a collector’s item, flavor be damned, but that is absolutely not the case here. This new 18-year-old bourbon is a blend of two of Redemption’s mashbills: the regular bourbon (75 percent corn, 21 percent rye, 4 percent barley), and the high-rye bourbon (60 percent corn, 36 percent rye, 4 percent barley). What’s in the bottle came from just 69 barrels that were aged for 18 years in Indiana before being brought to Kentucky for blending. The resulting whiskey certainly has a strong oaky backbone, but there is so much more going on here. The liquid is vibrant despite its elevated age, with a deep palate full of notes of cherry, brown sugar, black pepper, pipe tobacco, leather, and flamed orange peel. The whiskey is bottled without chill filtration and at cask strength of 103.4 proof to preserve as much flavor as possible.

There are just 2,400 bottles of Redemption 18-Year-Old available, each with a price tag of $400, and hopefully you’ll be able to find it for close to that because it is really a superb bourbon (ReserveBar currently has it available for preorder at that price). And no, this doesn’t mean that the brand will continue to release incrementally older bourbons in the future because, according to Kennedy, it’s about the quality and flavor and not the number on the label (although anything is possible). If you’re looking to splurge on an older bourbon that is truly worth the expense, take a sabbatical from the Pappy hunt and track down this bottle instead.

Score: 97