Skip to Content

Barrell Craft Spirits 25 Year Old Whiskey Review

Barrell Craft Spirits 25 Year Old Whiskey Review

In late 2018, Barrell Bourbon began to make some major changes within their brand. They abandoned their Barrell Whiskey and Barrell Rum batched releases while announcing that their new name would be “Barrell Craft Spirits.”

To celebrate this new change, they revealed a brand-new line that would use this name. Three different labels were launched wearing a new color scheme on the front of the bottle – gray and black. These included a 13-year-old Rum, 15-year-old Bourbon and 25-year-old (corn) whiskey.

Compared to the 15-year-old bourbon (which had about 15,000 bottles produced), the 25-year-old whiskey immediately sold out.  This was probably due in no small part because only 570 bottles were produced.

BCS25 – a true one off?

Every year since 2018, Barrell Craft Spirits has released a bourbon in their “Gray Label” collection.  The other types of spirits seem to rotate with no clear pattern.  Barrell has released other Gray Label Whiskies, but they’ve all been made from Canadian Whisky, not MGP Corn Whiskey.

Speaking of MGP, Barrell outright admitted that the barrels used for this release had been resting in MGP/Seagram’s warehouses for that entire time.  The recipe that Barrell sourced was a genuine corn whiskey with a mash bill of 81% corn, 15% rye and 4% malted barley and aged in used barrels.  This is the same mash bill found in Barrell Whiskey Batch 001.

Joe Beatrice, Barrell Craft Spirits’ founder, wanted to do something special with the ultra-aged corn whiskey. So he obtained some uber-rare Sercial Madeira wine barrels to finish the whiskey in.

Sercial is one of the driest wines in the Madeira family, but also the most mellow. This fortified wine is typically aged anywhere from 5 to 10 years, meaning these barrels were likely well used and perfect for imparting their flavors into a whiskey.

So when all was said and done, how did this whiskey turn out? It’s not every day I get to drink a whiskey that’s 25 years old, so I was extremely eager to try this one. I sampled this neat and from a glencairn.

Tasting Notes

Nose: Vanilla beans, butterscotch pudding and cloves start this dram out on a soft, sweet note. Then I start to pick up on some dark fruit notes accompanied by baked pears. These are followed by Macadamia nut cookies with white chocolate chips. Strangely, I am also detecting cocoa powder and cigar ash.

Palate: Bright, vivid fruit flavors dominate. They are hard to explain because they gradually transform into more acidic fruit flavors, but I wouldn’t call them citrus. I find the taste of a red-wine reduction, brown butter and even rosemary. Through it all, I can taste the underlying sweet cornbread note that also is accompanied by a note that I can only describe as “hot cooking oil.” I don’t know how else to put it into words.

Even though this was likely aged in a used barrel, I’m shocked to taste such deep wood notes. Did those come from the Sercial Maderia barrels? The whole palate is wrapped up delicately with a sort of melted vanilla ice cream body. This was a wild and intense ride.

Finish: The fruits on the palate become more defined after I finish my sip and open my mouth a bit. Orchard fruits come to the front but I also am experiencing lingering notes of mango and kiwi which are outright ridiculous. There’s no way those two notes should be found in a whiskey, yet here we are. The finish does let the ultra-aged corn whiskey shine through the whole time, never letting you forget the base distillate, but instead of being somewhat hot and sharp like other corn whiskies (Mellow Corn), this dumps a ton of softer oak notes on your tongue.

There’s also a degree of herbal notes that seem to come in and out of focus as the finish fades away. Of note, the finish is only medium in length, but still extraordinary.

Score: 9.5/10

Sometimes a whiskey comes along that changes your world and introduces you to flavors and scents that you’ve never experienced. Barrell Craft Spirits 25 Year Old Whiskey is that whiskey.

For all the more intensity and perfectly tuned flavors it provided, I scored it just shy of a perfect 10 because of the shorter-than-expected finish. Outside of that, it was magical. I had to wait a long time to scoop one of these up, but it was absolutely worth it.

The thing that I still can’t wrap my head around is that we’ll likely never see this again. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of release. MGP likely had these barrels hanging around with no clear product that they were destined to be in. Somehow Joe was able to buy them. Then he took the risk of finishing this rare liquid in a rare cask that I don’t think has much experience being used to finish whiskies in. It must have been daunting, but the risk ended up being worth the reward.

Final Thoughts

The American whiskey world has seen some very lust-worthy releases lately from the company “The Last Drop” that are fetching four digits to buy and can’t be found by normal means. Barrell casually dropped this to most markets for $350 and let the consumer figure it out.  In a way, everyone had a chance to get one if they wanted.

We may never see such a well-crafted finished whiskey come from Barrell Craft Spirits again.  It’s been years after this release and I still can’t tell you what bottle comes close (Gold Label Seagrass, perhaps).  It’s truly a testament to the sourcing and finishing prowess of Joe Beatrice and the rest of the team at Barrell Craft Spirits. It might be hard to trap lightning in a bottle, but with this one release, they succeeded. Job well done.

Featured Products

  • Neat Traveler
  • View Larger
  • Description:The Aged & Ore Neat Traveler is a complete travel kit for spirits. We combined our widely praised Neat Glass with one of our 3oz Flight Bottles and housed them together in a custom EVA travel case. Perfect for a night away with your favorite pour. The tie
  • Bottle Flight
  • View Larger
  • Description:The Aged & Ore Bottle Flight is a premium set of 4 custom silicone wrapped glass bottles designed to transport and share samples of your favorite spirits. The flight bottles come in a custom EVA travel case that fits perfectly in any small bag. An Aged &
  • Travel Bundle
  • View Larger
  • Description:This Bundle combines two of our crowd favorite products, creating the ultimate travel bundle to bring along your favorite spirits and glassware. Bundle Includes: Neat Traveler (Gray) Bottle Flight (Gray) Note: This bundle is only available in gray and col

*Bourbon Culture is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Enable Notifications OK No thanks