Wheated bourbon swaps the rye in the mash bill for wheat — and the result tends to be softer, sweeter, and more approachable than its rye-forward counterparts, with a natural affinity for fruit, vanilla, and baking-forward flavors. It's the grain bill behind some of the most iconic names in bourbon, and at the 2026 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, four expressions stood out from the field under blind tasting.

The Best of Class winner will be announced at the Top Shelf 2026 Awards Gala on November 8 at the Hotel Nikko San Francisco.

The mash bill behind Safai Bourbon was originally conceived as a wheat beer recipe before Mike Safai adapted it for distillation, introducing honey-roasted malt as a key ingredient in place of conventional malted barley. Each single barrel release is aged eight years before bottling at cask strength, unfiltered, with a bottle count that rarely exceeds a few hundred.

1845 Distilling Company is named for the year Texas passed its Preemption Act — and the land the distillery sits on received its original preemption grant from the Republic of Texas in December of that same year. Eight generations of the distiller's family have roots on that property; his grandmother still lives on the original homestead. The brand is a grain-to-glass operation built entirely on 100% Texas-grown grains, using yellow corn, red winter wheat, and malted barley. All expressions are bottled at 100 proof, meeting the Bottled-in-Bond standard that requires a single distillation season, a single distiller, and a minimum of four years of federally supervised aging. The distillery earned a Double Gold at the 2023 SFWSC with its very first entries — a remarkable debut on this stage.

The Heaven Hill Grain to Glass program represents the distillery's fullest expression of transparency from field to bottle: each year, Heaven Hill partners with Beck's Hybrids to select a specific corn seed varietal suited for Central Kentucky soils, then contracts a single family farm, Peterson Farms in Nelson County, directly across from the Bardstown campus, to grow it. 

The Specialty Barrel Series sits alongside the Traditional Barrel Series in Heaven Hill's Grain to Glass portfolio, using the same seed program, the same farm, and the same wheated mashbill,but aged in an entirely different oak. For the 2025 release, Heaven Hill Master Distiller Conor O'Driscoll selected Chinquapin oak barrels in partnership with Independent Stave Company. Chinquapin is a rare species of American white oak native to central and eastern North America, known for elevated levels of vanillin and a distinct flavor contribution that differs meaningfully from the standard white oak barrel. The Wheated Bourbon was aged six years in these barrels, bottled non-chill filtered at 105 proof, and released as a limited annual expression.

Wheated bourbon's hallmark is a gentleness that takes time to reveal its full depth — and all four of these finalists demonstrate what that style can achieve at its most expressive. What makes this category particularly compelling in a competition context is how much variation is possible within a single grain-bill choice. The same decision to use wheat over rye can produce a dessert-forward Texas sipper, a honey-and-coffee-inflected Kentucky single barrel, or two distinct expressions from the same family farm depending entirely on the wood the distiller chooses. That range, and the quality ceiling it can reach, is exactly what earns wheated bourbon its dedicated following.