At the 2026 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, more than 550 bourbon entries were evaluated through strict, anonymous blind tasting. Every finalist in the Small Batch Bourbon – 6 to 10 Years category earned it the same way: unanimous Double Gold from a panel of industry experts who never saw a label. Four expressions made it through. A Kentucky straight with the kind of layered, deeply aromatic nose that stops you mid-pour. A Nashville original from the first pitmaster in America to build his own bourbon brand. A Maryland-based nano-blend. And a decade-in-the-making single malt from a Wisconsin distillery carrying three generations of stillman heritage. The Best of Class winner will be named at the Top Shelf 2026 Awards Gala, November 8 at the Hotel Nikko San Francisco.

Time Sipping Away is a Kentucky small batch straight bourbon built around patience — and it shows in the glass. This is a bourbon that rewards slow, attentive drinking, the kind that reveals new things on each pour.

Founded in Nashville by award-winning barbecue pitmaster Carey Bringle — the first pitmaster in the United States to launch his own bourbon brand — Peg Leg Porker has built one of the most distinctive identities in American whiskey. Bringle's philosophy is simple: bourbon and BBQ belong together, and great whiskey, like great barbecue, takes time. The 8-year-old expression is filtered through Bringle's own custom-made hickory charcoal — a subtle finishing touch that ties the whiskey directly to his roots — and bottled at 90 proof to let its flavors stand up to food and to themselves.

Silverthorn Reserve operates on a deliberately small scale — nano-blending projects of just 2 to 10 barrels, custom barrel finishing, and single-barrel curation rooted in precision rather than volume. The Bourbon Blend represents that ethos in full: a carefully constructed small-batch expression that brings the rigor of a seasoned industry professional to a canvas where every barrel decision is visible in the glass.

Dancing Goat Distillery in Cambridge, Wisconsin was founded by Travis Hasse and Tom Maas whose father Duane got his start in the spirits business in 1959 and whose industry work over the following decades touched everything from Seagram's to Chartreuse. Today Nick Maas, Tom's son, runs the distillery and carries that three-generation lineage forward. Stillman's Sonder began as a series of exploratory single-malt distillation runs at MGP in Indiana in early 2010 — barrels the Maas family quietly collected and aged in secret. When the stocks had grown deep enough and the whiskey mature enough, the Dancing Goat team spent eighteen months in analysis, blending, re-barreling, and finishing before a single bottle was released. The result is a 10-year expression that reflects not just what's in the barrel, but the full weight of what it took to get there.

Secure your tickets to Top Shelf 2026 to be the first to learn who won the Best of Class award for the category.