Booker’s Rye Is Flavored with Cinnamon, and It Works

Welcome to Taste Test, where every week our critic Jonah Flicker explores the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Sunday for his latest whiskey review.

A decade ago, Booker’s released its first rye whiskey, and it soon became a cult bottle that you can now find selling for more than $2,000 on the secondary market. Well, Booker’s just released its second rye whiskey, and for some reason the brand decided to do something that literally no one was asking for and many people assumed would be horrible—it finished the whiskey in apple brandy barrels and flavored it with cinnamon. I know what you’re thinking, but bear with me here because it actually kind of works.

If you’re a whiskey fan, you’re familiar with Booker’s as being the uncut, unfiltered, barrel-strength bourbon released in several batches per year by the James B. Beam Distilling Co., the home of Jim Beam bourbon. And if you’re a diehard whiskey fan, hopefully you’ve had a chance to try “Big Time Batch,” as the first rye was known, because it was great. According to the brand, this whiskey was made using a specific mashbill developed by the late master distiller Booker Noe in the early 2000s, which is said to be different from the usual Beam rye recipe or the Pennsylvania-style recipe it has used for a special edition of Old Overholt. The exact percentages are not disclosed, but some believe it to be somewhere around 65 percent rye grain, splitting the difference between the previous two mashbills mentioned.

Whatever the case, it was a great rye whiskey, bottled at a strong 68.1 percent ABV—which is high even by Booker’s standards. This new rye is the latest edition of the Reserves series created by eighth-generation master distiller Freddie Noe, grandson of Booker and son of current Beam master distiller Fred Noe. The first Reserves was a blend of aged bourbons, the second was finished in El Tesoro tequila barrels, and now we have a rye whiskey that was matured for six years, two months, and 23 days, and then inexplicably finished in apple brandy barrels for an undisclosed amount of time with cinnamon sticks inserted into the liquid to add flavor. To be fair, according to Freddie this is actually explicable, based on an apple wine recipe Booker used to make using apples, bourbon barrels, and cinnamon. But still.

The online chatter about this whiskey before it was released, based entirely on TTB labels that you can access online, was pretty brutal. A writer I know referred to it as “Booker’s Fireball.” Another speculated that the barrel finish may have gone awry and this could have been an attempt to correct it, expressing disbelief that the distillery would release this when it could have had another unicorn bottle of Booker’s Rye on its hands, especially given how hard it is to find the original. I certainly approached this new whiskey with a bit of trepidation, but the job description is to have an open mind, and I have to say that I did not hate it. Make no mistake, this whiskey tastes mostly like cinnamon, which I guess is the point. Yes, there some other notes that reveal themselves, including a bit of apple and that typical Booker’s punch of oak, peanuts, and caramel… but really it’s mostly cinnamon. I’m not talking potpourri cinnamon that you might get from an amburana finish, just straight up cinnamon sticks.

I returned to this whiskey several times over the course of a week, and it began to grow on me. You could argue that Beam should have released this as something else entirely instead of slapping a Booker’s label on the bottle, because really this bears very little resemblance to the concept of Booker’s. On the other hand, everybody should just calm down because whiskey isn’t some sacred rite not to be trifled with; it’s just booze, so why not mess with convention a bit? This might not convince entrenched drinkers to give this rye whiskey a fair shot, and there will be plenty of people who do try it and just don’t like it.

And that’s fair; I can safely say that this is not going to become an everyday staple for me. You could try to position this as being a great winter weather whiskey with all that cinnamon in the mix, but really it’s just an oddball release and that’s okay. I would urge you to at least try the new Booker’s Reserves 2026, and definitely give it a spin in an Old Fashioned, to see what you think of it. Who knows, you might just start preaching the gospel of barrel-proof cinnamon whiskey.

Score: 86

See Also

672 Napa Valley Wine Club Is Shipping 3 Superb Red Wines in March 2025