Crown Royal 31 Year Old Is a Great Ultra-Aged Whisky

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.

Hey, whisky fans, in case you haven’t heard: Old age statements aren’t just for single malt scotch anymore. Granted, this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon when it comes to Canadian whisky, but it is less common in this category and mostly applies to blends. The latest release to flaunt a hefty age statement comes from popular Canadian whisky brand Crown Royal, which dropped its oldest whisky to date this fall.

That whisky is called Crown Royal Aged 31 Years, an unnecessarily polite way of referring to the fact that this whisky spent more than three decades inside of barrels. Other than that, the brand doesn’t offer a whole lot of info about what’s in the bottle. Crown Royal, which is owned by drinks giant Diageo, is produced at a large distillery in Gimli, Manitoba (and a smaller one in Quebec), where five different styles of whisky are made from grains like corn, rye, and barley on pot and column stills. Generally speaking, each whisky is aged separately in new and used oak barrels before blending. I reached out to Stephen Wilson, who holds the lofty title of director of whisky engagement, and he said that this release is just the rye mashbill (about 96 percent rye, four percent malted barley), with no other components in the blend. That might explain why this whisky is so good, based on other Crown Royal rye releases.

This whisky follows two others that were bottled at 29 and 30 years old, part of what the brand calls its Higher Marques series, so presumably there’s enough stock aging at the distillery (which has about 1.5 million barrels in its inventory) that there will be even older expressions to come. Bring those old whiskies on, although I will be honest and say that I don’t generally drink a whole lot of Canadian whisky. Still, this is a bottle that I will revisit. The palate is slightly bitter in an appealing way, a nice counterpoint to the intense vanilla sweetness I often get from Canadian blends. There are also notes of stewed fruit, vanilla (of course), honey, cherry, orange, oak, espresso, and milk chocolate. The whisky is bottled at 46 percent ABV instead of the usual 40, and that higher proof goes a long way to provide a bit more flavor and some welcome heat.

Crown Royal 31 isn’t exactly cheap at $600 per bottle, but compared to a single malt scotch or even a blended scotch aged for that long, it’s kind of a bargain. I get it, scotch fans, this whisky might not make your top 10 list this year, and if you’re going to spend a few hundred bucks on a bottle it’s understandable if you’d rather drop it on something else. But Crown Royal has been quietly releasing some excellent new whiskies over the past few years, stretching all the way back to Northern Harvest Rye (which was named World Whisky of the Year nearly a decade ago by whiskey clown Jim Murray back when people cared about what he thought), and more recently an 18-year-old blend and Golden Apple, a 23-year-old flavored whisky that had the audacity to be good. Add this 31-year-old whisky to that list of whisky triumphs.

Score: 86