12 hours ago
Lasso Motel 18 Year Wins Best American Whiskey Award
An Ascot Award was presented to all the 2025 winners with the best spirits.
Lasso Motel 18-Year American Straight Whiskey was named the best American whiskey by a panel of judges during the 2025 Ascot Awards.
Lasso Motel was also named the Best in Show Ultimate Winner — No. 1 among all entries — in the annual competition recognizing the world's best spirits. Sixty judges also selected the year's best scotch, rye, Irish whiskey, agave, rum, vodka, brandy and liqueur.
Dallas-based Dynasty Spirits produces Lasso Motel 18-Year American Straight Whiskey, and online retail prices begin at $129.99 for a 750 milliliter bottle.
The 121-proof whiskey, with a mash bill of 99% corn and 1% malted barley, is aged for 18 years in used bourbon barrels at the Midwest Grain Products Distillery in Indiana. Dynasty Spirits says the taste starts 'with rich notes of new oak and moves into buttery toffee and sweet sugar-maple before finishing with dried apricot.'
Bourbon and spirits expert Fred Minnick, who founded and runs the annual competition, says the win by Lasso Motel 18 Year American Straight Whiskey represents a whiskey trend during the past few years.
'The best whiskey coming out of America is no longer just bourbon or rye whiskey,' he says. 'Blends of straights, light whiskeys and creative finishes have been getting better every year, and Lasso Motel is indicative of that.'
Belvedere 10, named the best vodka in the Ascot Awards, and Armand de Brignac champagne sponsored a private party in London in February that was hosted by Marc Jacques Burton and Machine Gun Kelly. (Photo by Max Cisotti/for The Rex Rooms)
The spirits deemed best by the judges this year are:
There were about 1,000 samples of spirits entered in the competition. The samples were blind-tasted and graded on a 100-point scale based on a series of criteria related to appearance, aroma, taste and finish. Top scores in each class of spirits advanced to a championship round where Minnick and an expert in each specific class blind-tasted the samples and choose a champion during a live streaming event.
The ASCOT Awards debuted in 2021, when Minnick founded the American Spirits Council of Tasters. He has written seven books and plans to next year release a new book Bottom Shelf: How a Forgotten Brand of Bourbon Saved One Man's Life.
