Sazerac 18 years

About the Sazerac 18 years

Sazerac 18 years is a Kentucky rye whisky, bottled at 45% ABV with no added colouring. Eighteen years is a long time for rye in the United States, where the grain turns woody fast. This age is unusual for the style. It arrives as an annual release from Sazerac, in small numbers, and it sells out fast. The label stays plain. The whisky inside does not. The story behind this bottling starts in 1985, when the rye was distilled and filled into oak. By 2003 the barrels were pushing towards two decades, and more wood would have ruined them. So the whisky was emptied into stainless steel tanks. Steel is inert, so ageing simply stopped. Buffalo Trace drew from those tanks for years, and the 2015 bottling emptied the last of them. Smell it and you get baking spice and leather first, then cherry and apricot pushing through. Honey sits underneath, with a faint cola sweetness. Then the rye asserts itself on the palate. Ginger, black pepper, cinnamon and clove pile up over gingerbread and cocoa. Old oak runs beneath all of it. Things turn sweeter at the end, with vanilla, caramel and marzipan, before a cool lick of anise and fennel. Most rye reaches the shelf young, at a handful of years. Sazerac 18 years sits far beyond that. The tanked releases held one batch of 1985 spirit, unchanged, across a decade of bottlings. That is rare in whisky, where every year brings variation. Releases after 2015 draw on a different vintage, so the character has shifted. Age and consistency are what this bottling was built around.