Is the Top Floor top notch?
Benchmark is a collection of bourbons from Buffalo Trace. It’s a collection that’s easy to overlook amid the more prominent Buffalo Trace offerings like W.L. Weller, E.H. Taylor, the Prohibition collection, or the forever famous Pappy Van Winkle collection. While these whiskies and others tend to bogart all of the Buffalo Trace attention, Benchmark is quietly offering affordable, tasty bourbons that you don’t have to track down on the Black Market – much like the rest of the items out of Buffalo Trace these days.
Benchmark is named for the three McAfee brothers, who traveled, explored, and surveyed Kentucky long before it was a chartered state. In their exploration, they marked the land where the Buffalo Trace Distillery now stands with benchmarks. And well, here we are now with the Benchmark brand in their honor. To date, the collection includes just about everything you could imagine: a small batch (Benchmark Small Batch), a single barrel (Benchmark Single Barrel), a bottled-in-bond (Benchmark Bonded), a high-proof (Benchmark Full Proof), and the original, flagship bourbon (Benchmark Old No. 8 Brand). The group is all rounded out by Benchmark Top Floor.
The “top floor” of Top Floor refers to the location in the rickhouse where this bourbon is aged. Now, the location of the barrel might seem like no big deal and a really weak marketing point, but the placement of the barrel is actually pretty important. During the aging process, bourbon is stored in barrels in a giant warehouse known as a rickhouse. The higher up a barrel is in the rickhouse, the more it’s exposed to fluctuating temperatures. In other words: Barrels at the top of the rickhouse age faster than their counterparts at the bottom of the rickhouse. The idea of where barrels live or stay during aging is a debated one, depending on the distillery. Maker’s Mark, for example, rotates each of their barrels around the rickhouse to nail a consistent taste across the barrels. Others like Elijah Craig build open air rickhouses to expose all of the barrels to temperature fluctuations without rotating them. While others still, purposefully don’t rotate any barrels to create different lines or brands of the same recipe.
Buffalo Trace is known for doing exactly that. Of course, in reality this just means that the barrels aged on the bottom floor of the rickhouse can be found on the top shelf of your local liquor store and vice versa. Hence why Benchmark Top Floor is a breezy $20, while bottom aged Pappy Van Winkle will cost you an arm and a leg. For the $20 price point, Benchmark Top Floor is not too shabby. It’s a light bourbon with a charred oak smell that moves into a dry, tobacco and oak flavor. The dry taste increases throughout the sip before leaving you with a lingering leather, oak, and subtle peppercorn flavor. Together, the dry flavors create a sense of bitterness in this bourbon that’s just a little hot for an 86 proof.
We love a budget bourbon as much as the next person, but we’d be hard pressed to pick Benchmark Top Floor, even at that price point. That same $20 price range could you get something much more satisfying like Jim Beam Bonded or Old Grand-Dad Bonded or for even less coin you could snag almost any of the Evan Williams collection instead. Ironically though, for about the same amount of money, you can also buy any other members of the Benchmark family – all of which we prefer over Top Floor.
Unfortunately for us, Benchmark Top Floor is at the bottom of our wish list.
STATS: Benchmark Top Floor Bourbon
- Price for us: $20 for 750 mL
- Proof: 86
- Aged: NAS
- Distillery: Buffalo Trace, owned by the Sazerac Company
- Recommendation: Mixer
