Old Elk Infinity Blend (2023) Whiskey Review
Photos via Old Elk
There are a lot of gimmicks out there in the whiskey world, vying for drinkers’ attention at any given time, but Old Elk Infinity Blend may well be one of my personal favorites. The concept here is poaching the general idea of a collector’s infinity bottle, or the more commercial use of a solera system, to create a whiskey release that theoretically should grow in complexity on a year-by-year basis. Now in its third year (the project began in 2021, and this “2023” release is just hitting shelves now), the base of each year’s Old Elk Infinity Blend release is … last year’s blend.
Now, handled with cynicism this could be little more than a gimmick–I can see a distillery putting out a product like this and just using 2% or so of the previous year’s release in the blend, for the sake of technicality. Old Elk and Master Distiller Greg Metze aren’t doing that, though–they’re making each past year’s Infinity Blend release a genuine, major component of the next year’s release, showing their forethought in setting enough aside to be able to do that. Another aspect I like here: Each year’s concept, outside of the returning distillate from a year earlier, is drilling in more and more on Old Elk’s rapidly maturing core product. As such, this is the first release in the series to be made without any new additions of sourced Kentucky bourbon–but theoretically, with the addition of each year’s prior Infinity Blend, they’ll always be present in slowly reducing percentages over the years. The 2023 batch, meanwhile, is made up of the following:
— 15.3% Old Elk 2022 Infinity Blend
— 40% Old Elk high malt bourbon aged 8 years
— 43.2% Old Elk straight wheat whiskey aged 7 years
— 1.5% Old Elk straight wheat whiskey aged 10 years
That package is then bottled at a robust 57.575% (111.15 proof). It all adds up to a moderate-to-high aged blend of various Old Elk bourbon and wheat-accented mash bills, and I’m looking forward to tasting it. So let’s get to it.