Today’s post starts with a confession. The Maker’s Mark Cask Strength was supposed to be the control in this experiment. Background character. The baseline. A good friend of mine who owns a liquor store told me the Bardstown Origin Series was a Weller killer, so I set up a blind with the Weller 107, the Bardstown, and the Maker’s Cask Strength as the anchor. I figured I knew where everything would land. I was wrong.

Batch 25-02. 112.8 proof. Minimum seven years old. Wheated mash bill, meaning red winter wheat instead of rye as the secondary grain. Bottled uncut and unfiltered straight out of Loretto, Kentucky. Those are the facts. Here’s what happened in the glass.

I poured three blinds and started working through them. The first one hit me with tons of brown sugar and caramel rushing right off the glass. Classic wheater. Easy to enjoy. The second one was more understated on the nose. Vanilla ice cream. Almost candy-like. More corn forward than the first, a little more harsh, but that nose was genuinely beautiful. The third had that telltale grape note that anyone who has spent time with wheated bourbons is going to recognize immediately.

I called it wrong. What I thought was the Bardstown Origin turned out to be the Maker’s Cask Strength. The bottle I called polished and refined, the one I ranked second overall in a blind against the Weller 107 and a bottle that was specifically brought in to kill it. That was the Maker’s.

That vanilla ice cream nose I mentioned is the wheat doing its thing. No rye here, so there’s no spice fighting for attention on the front end. What you get instead is caramelized sugar, vanilla bean, and this soft honeyed sweetness that just kind of sits there inviting you in. Beautiful nose start to finish.

The palate is where the proof makes its presence known. Deep toffee, brown sugar, vanilla extract right up front. The corn forward quality I caught in the blind is there but it’s working in context now that I know what I’m drinking. There’s a dark chocolate note underneath all of it and the wheat gives the whole thing a softness that keeps 112.8 proof from feeling like a gut punch. It’s a big pour that somehow still drinks easy.

The finish is long and warm. Spice, caramel, oak. Nothing dramatic, nothing that overstays its welcome. Just a clean, satisfying close that makes you want to go back for another sip, which is exactly what a cask strength bottle at this level should be doing.

The wax top on this thing, for the record, came off beautifully. Maker’s Mark wax is best in class and I will die on that hill.

Now on price. This is not a cheap bottle. But for an uncut, unfiltered, seven year minimum wheated bourbon at cask strength, you’re getting genuine value for what’s in the glass. If you can find it at or near MSRP, pick it up.

It came in second in a blind against the Weller 107 and beat out a bottle that was specifically brought in as a Weller killer. For a control that was never supposed to be the story, that’s a hell of a result.