A year ago, the Toronto Whisky Society founders decided to commemorate Canada’s 150th birthday with a competition dedicated to Canadian whisky from across the country and various categories. The feedback we got on it from distilleries and readers was so positive that we decided to make it an annual event!

For 2018, we made a couple of improvements, based on the feedback we got:

• We expanded the number of distilleries we contacted to include every whisky-producing distillery in Canada, so everyone had an equal shot.
• We tasted every sample blind, to eliminate any potential bias in our tasting notes and rankings.
• Instead of doing a full ranked list by category, we decided to name our “best in category” and “runner-up” along with honourable mentions when applicable, (since really ranking something 12th or 14th is meaningless and unnecessary!). We individually ranked the samples in the category and collated those rankings to determine the winners.

The set of samples we received differed from last year, and we had participants from new regions and distilleries which was very exciting! The bottles fell nicely into 4 categories again this year:

Under-aged whisky spirits (4)

Canadian Ryes (5)

Canadian Single Malts (6)

Canadian Whiskies (16)

A huge thank you to all of the distilleries that participated this year, and congrats to the ‘winners’ (but really, we’re the winners since we got to try them all)! We hope our readers will check out some of these distilleries you may not have heard of or tried before and give them a shot!

We will be running this again next year when we hope even more distilleries will jump on board, so please reach out via our contact page to find out how.