Meet the 2026 SFWSC Best Small Batch Bourbon - Up to 5 Years Finalists.
With more than 550 bourbon entries evaluated at this year's San Francisco World Spirits Competition, earning a place in the finals is no small achievement. The SFWSC subjects every entry to a strict blind tasting process. Judges score each spirit without seeing the brand, the bottle, or the price. Only those that earn a unanimous Double Gold from every judge on the panel advance to the sweepstakes round, where the best in each category is named Best of Class.
In the Small Batch Bourbon – Up to 5 Years category, three expressions rose to the top of that field: a barrel proof Kentucky release making a bold case for young American whiskey, a malt-forward Tennessee original with an unusually creative grain bill, and a North Carolina-blended expression finished in not one but two European casks. Each took a different path to get here — and each brought something genuinely distinct to the glass.
The Best of Class winner will be announced at the Top Shelf 2026 Awards Gala. Until then, here's what our judges tasted.
Wheel Horse Whiskey — Barrel Master Select Batch #2 Bourbon
Distilled and matured at the historic Green River Distilling in Owensboro, Kentucky, Wheel Horse has quietly built one of the more compelling value propositions in American bourbon. Batch #2 continues where that inaugural release left off: hand-selected barrels, no chill filtration, and nothing added or taken away between barrel and bottle.
Chattanooga Whiskey — Cask 111 Batch 26B16R
Chattanooga Whiskey was founded by Tim Piersant and Joe Ledbetter in 2011 with a mission they described simply as bringing "whiskey to the people." In 2015, they released the first whiskey produced in Chattanooga in 100 years, and began crafting their malt-forward style of straight bourbon whiskey — Tennessee High Malt — which launched in August 2019. In March 2017, the company opened its Riverfront Distillery in downtown Chattanooga, transforming a historic car dealership into one of the largest craft bourbon distilleries in the South.
Cask 111 is the unfiltered, barrel-strength expression of that Tennessee High Malt recipe. Each 6–10-barrel lot is hand-selected to highlight the subtle batch-to-batch variation of this distinctly cask-forward expression.
Bronze Bull Spirits — Batch #7 Bourbon Finished in Armagnac and Orange Liqueur Barrels
Bronze Bull Spirits operates out of Liberty & Plenty Distillery in Durham, North Carolina — a production house with a wide creative remit. Batch #7 is a limited release of 1,200 bottles, sourced from American-crafted bourbon using 5- and 6-year whiskeys, fractionally blended by hand in North Carolina, with double barrel finishing in Armagnac and Orange Liqueur barrels. The blend draws from one cask of 5-year Indiana bourbon, two casks of 6-year Kentucky bourbon, and one cask of 8-year Indiana bourbon — each bringing its own character before the European finishing casks add a final layer of complexity. The barrels spent 11 months in French Armagnac barrels and 11 months in French Orange Liqueur barrels, a dual-finish approach that sets this expression well apart from the field.
