There's a moment in every underdog story where you stop and ask yourself whether what just happened was real. For Onyx & Amber, that moment came at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, when Copper Buffalo was named the World's Best American Style Whiskey at the 2026 World Whiskies Awards — and the brand hadn't even been around for a full year.
Let that sink in for a second. Not best new whiskey. Not best regional whiskey. Best American style whiskey in the world, competing on an international stage, in year one.
The man behind it, Benjamin Rosen, didn't exactly sound like someone who had been chasing a trophy. "We didn't set out to win awards," he said after the announcement. "We set out to make whiskey that we actually wanted to drink — and to give people an experience that felt nothing like what the rest of the industry was offering. The fact that this is being recognized tells us we're on the right track, but honestly, the real validation happens every time someone comes into the distillery and doesn't want to leave."
That attitude probably tells you everything you need to know about how Onyx & Amber operates. This wasn't a brand cooked up by a marketing team looking for a gap in the market. It came out of ten years of real work, real relationships, and a genuine obsession with what great whiskey can be.
Before Onyx & Amber had a name or a logo or a bottle on a shelf, Rosen was running Colorado Bourbon & Rye Collectors, a group that spent a decade going deep into the world of single barrel whiskey. Over that stretch, the group conducted more than 150 single barrel selections — the kind of hands-on, boots-in-the-rickhouse work that most whiskey drinkers only ever hear about secondhand. Along the way, they raised more than half a million dollars for charity. That's not a side note. That's the foundation the whole brand was built on.
Those years gave Rosen something that money can't really buy: the knowledge of what makes a barrel exceptional and the connections to actually find one. When it came time to build Onyx & Amber, he wasn't starting from scratch. He was cashing in a decade's worth of earned understanding.
The whiskey that just won best in the world reflects exactly that. Copper Buffalo is an 18-year American light whiskey blend finished in 16-year-old used bourbon barrels. It's a one-time expression, meaning once it's gone, it's gone. There won't be a second version of this exact whiskey, because that's not how Onyx & Amber works. Every release is its own thing — a product of a specific set of barrels, a specific moment in time, and the particular conditions that shaped them.
Those conditions matter more than most people realize, and this is where Colorado enters the conversation in a serious way.
Aging whiskey in Colorado is not the same as aging whiskey anywhere else. The state sits at altitude, with dramatic swings in barometric pressure and dry mountain air that do things to a barrel that a Kentucky warehouse simply can't replicate. The wood breathes differently. Water gets pulled out of the spirit while everything else concentrates. The interaction between whiskey and barrel is more aggressive, more dynamic, and the results show up in the glass. What Rosen and the people at Onyx & Amber have found is that seven years of aging in Colorado produces a whiskey that drinks like something that's been in a barrel for twelve. The climate is doing years of work in less time, building richness and viscosity that takes longer to develop in softer environments.
For Copper Buffalo specifically, that dynamic played out over 18 years of development in the whiskey itself, with the final finishing pass happening in those 16-year-old bourbon barrels. The result, according to everyone who judged it in Louisville, is the best American style whiskey being made right now.
The first batch is already sold out. That part probably won't surprise anyone who understands how whiskey collecting works. When a limited, one-time expression wins a global award, the window for getting your hands on it closes fast. But Rosen has said a second batch is currently finishing in used bourbon barrels and will be released later this year.
Here's the important thing to understand about that second batch, though. It won't taste exactly like the first. And that's completely intentional. No two barrels age the same way, and in Colorado's climate especially, the variance from one set of barrels to the next can be significant. Onyx & Amber doesn't try to smooth that out or engineer consistency. The whole point is to let each release be what it is — to embrace what the barrels became rather than force them into a predetermined flavor profile.
That philosophy is one of three principles the brand has built itself around. Transparency is the first: tell customers exactly what they're drinking, where it came from, and how it was made. No mystery sourcing, no vague language designed to obscure the origins of the whiskey. Patience is the second: nothing leaves until it's actually ready. And discovery is the third, which is really just another way of saying they'd rather give you something genuinely interesting than something reliably predictable.
In a whiskey market that has spent years chasing consistency and brand recognition, that's a genuinely different approach. Most large-scale producers work hard to make sure every bottle of a given expression tastes as close to identical as possible. It's a reasonable business decision — consumers expect to know what they're getting when they buy a bottle they've had before. But it also means those producers are actively managing out the kind of variation that makes individual barrels fascinating.
Onyx & Amber is doing the opposite. They're putting the variation front and center and asking consumers to trust that the next bottle might be different from the last — and that different might actually be better.
The brand operates out of Denver, Colorado, and was born out of two problems Rosen identified after his decade in the barrel selection world. First, there was no great high-end Colorado whiskey. The state had plenty of craft distilleries doing interesting things, but nothing that had genuinely earned a place at the table with the best whiskeys being made anywhere in the country. Second, the barrel selection experience that had brought serious whiskey enthusiasts together — traveling to distilleries, working with distillers, tasting from barrels and choosing what to bottle — had largely disappeared after COVID. The events dried up, the access closed off, and the community that had formed around those experiences had nowhere to go.
Onyx & Amber is trying to bring that back. The brand offers immersive barrel selection experiences and tastings, focused on the kind of genuine hospitality and real transparency that Rosen spent ten years seeking out as a consumer himself. A Louisville location is set to open in spring 2026, giving the brand a presence in the city where the World Whiskies Awards just handed them their first major recognition.
The timing of that Louisville opening, coming right after the World Whiskies win, seems almost too convenient. But for anyone who's been following what Rosen has been building since his Colorado Bourbon & Rye Collectors days, the trajectory makes a certain kind of sense. This wasn't an overnight success story. It was ten years of work that finally had a stage to show itself on.
The whiskey world has a complicated relationship with new brands. There's always a tension between the deep history of established distilleries and the energy of newer operations that are willing to try things differently. Some of that skepticism is earned — plenty of brands have launched on hype and underdelivered. But Copper Buffalo's win at the World Whiskies Awards isn't based on marketing or story alone. It's based on what was in the glass, judged against every other American style whiskey entered in one of the most respected competitions in the industry.
Colorado just beat everyone. In year one.
For serious whiskey drinkers who haven't been paying attention to what's coming out of Denver, that result is worth sitting with. The next batch of Copper Buffalo is coming. It'll be different from the first. Given what the first one just accomplished, different is probably worth getting excited about.
