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From The Long Pour. Based on a live interview with Dixon Dedman, founder and blender of 2XO, recorded 12 October 2026, and on the three 2XO bottles our Bourbon club shipped in September. We buy the bottles we ship, and we weren't paid for this piece.
Early in our call, Dixon Dedman left the frame and came back holding what looked like a necklace for a very large dog. Small dark cubes of wood, threaded on a steel cable, hanging off a barrel bung.
"I could say, 'Well, it's pieces of oak threaded on a stainless steel string,'" he said. "But then when you see it, everybody's like, 'Not what I was expecting.'"
That chain is how the everyday 2XO bourbon gets its second dose of new oak. The two pricier bottles get theirs the slow, expensive way, in a second barrel. All three shipped to our Bourbon club in September, one per tier, so we asked him to walk through every one.
In this piece: What "Two Times Oak" means · American Oak and the chain · Rapper's Delight · Gem of Kentucky · The pour · FAQ
2XO stands for Two Times Oak. Every bottle under the label gets more contact with new charred oak than a standard bourbon does, which in 2XO's own words "builds sweetness and balances the spice" from its rye-forward mash bills.
2XO is a blending house. It doesn't run a distillery, and it doesn't name the ones it buys from. It picks aged Kentucky whiskey and finishes it, and Dedman has done some version of that for a long time: he relaunched his family's Kentucky Owl brand in 2014, per the same release, and calls those his "Kentucky Owl days." Back then, he said, Kentucky Owl put out one release a year.
2XO now runs three lines:
The second dose of oak goes in two ways. The Oak Series uses the chain, and the other two lines go into a second new barrel. By Dedman's account, that one choice explains most of the price gap between them.
Staged image: an AI-generated home bar scene built from a photo of the real bottle.
American Oak was the first everyday-priced bottle Dedman ever made, released in September 2023. He calls it his "kill it on Tuesday, replace it on Wednesday bottle."
As Dedman described the process, the bourbon, an 18% rye mash bill, ages about five and a half years in a char #3 barrel. Then the barrels get rolled out, the bungs come off, and a chain goes in: roughly 10 feet of American white oak cubes, cut from the scrap left over when staves are made, drilled, threaded on stainless steel and charred to about a #4. It drops straight through the bunghole and sits submerged.
"When it goes in, these look like Kingsford charcoal briquettes," he said. When they come out, the cubes are "almost spongy."
The chain stays in for 10 to 12 months, set by taste and by the time of year it went in. He had guessed four or five months when he started testing.
"The surface area on this chain or string of oak represents the exact same surface area as the interior of a new 53-gallon barrel," Dedman said. We hadn't seen that in print anywhere. By his account, American Oak gets the oak exposure of a second new barrel without anyone buying one. The chain costs far less than a barrel, he said, which is how a double-oaked bourbon lands at an everyday price.
The chain is there for balance. Before it goes in, he said, the whiskey is "really heavy on the back end. It's really heavy on the spice." The new oak adds vanilla and caramel up front. He wanted a bourbon near 90 proof that still moved across the palate, and he explains it with a road:
"If you look at your tongue, at the palate, like it's a highway, the goal of this is to follow the two yellow lines down the middle of the highway. So you get initial sweetness right in the middle that moves to a savory note, and then spice on the back end."
2XO's own notes for the bottle run the same direction: butterscotch, roasted cashews, nougat and caramel brittle, finishing on light peppery spice. It's bottled at 92 proof.
Bars took to it quickly, he said, and 2XO now bottles American Oak single barrels at 100 proof for bars and restaurants only. Dedman calls the bottle "a Swiss Army knife" for bartenders: they can play the sweet side or the spice side. He likes how far that stretches. A national steakhouse chain put a sweet American Oak Old Fashioned on its menu as a six-month special, and it has been there about 18 months. Chicago dive bars, meanwhile, pour it as the shot in a beer-and-a-shot.
Staged image: an AI-generated home bar scene built from a photo of the real bottle.
The Collectibles Series names come from Dedman's life, mostly by way of his team teasing him. "Hey, Dixon, we see you doing all these silly hip-hop videos with your kids," is how he tells it. Earlier releases include a Kiawah blend, a Vinyl blend and a Sneakerhead blend.
The seventh started the way a lot of good deals start, with someone talking at an event. One of Dedman's partners knew a couple of the founding members of the Sugarhill Gang, told them 2XO was thinking about a hip-hop blend, "and they're like, 'We want in.'"
So Rapper's Delight: The Hip-Hop Blend carries the group's name and art based on the original record artwork on its label. The song came out in 1979, and the group's own line in the release is that they "could never have imagined the song's impact." Dedman calls it the coolest collaboration he has been part of.
The whiskey is a hard turn from the Vinyl blend. "We're going way back in the other direction," he said. "This is a big caramel brown sugar bomb." Per 2XO's release, 90% of the blend is a high-rye bourbon (35% rye) re-barreled into new char #3 and #4 barrels for 9 to 12 months, and the other 10% is a moderate-rye bourbon (18% rye). It's 104 proof.
Greg, our host, had been working through his bottle before the call. "Syrup on syrup," was his note, and "deep brown." Dedman's warning: "It's a little bit dangerous, because it goes down pretty easily."
Our favorite story from the call came from a tasting in Colorado. During the Q&A, a man stood up and asked, with a straight face, "Dix, I have a question. What do you do when the chicken tastes like wood?" It's a line from the song. "Only half the room is picking up on it," Dedman said, "and the rest of us are just giggling."
Staged image: an AI-generated home bar scene built from a photo of the real bottle. The barrel number was edited to read #76.
Gem of Kentucky is where Dedman gets pointed about his category.
At large producers, he said, "single barrel" has "become far more a marketing term than it is a true way to show the nuance of an individual single barrel." When a big house samples a barrel and it doesn't match the house profile, he said, it doesn't get bottled under that label, so what you buy is mostly consistency. He was careful to leave private barrel picks and smaller producers out of that. His aim with Gem was to bottle barrels he thinks are great, whether or not they taste like the last one.
Every Gem is a single barrel that gets a second barrel. Dedman said each one spends six to seven years in its first new charred barrel before he moves it into a second new one; the original 2023 release says the second barrel lasts up to a year. The second barrel is either char #3 or char #4, and he said Gem is up to 190 barrels bottled so far.
The char level changes the whiskey. Char #3 second barrels, he said, bring "a lot more red fruit, bigger spice, a lot longer finish." Our Enthusiast tier's barrel was #76, and when Greg read the number out, Dedman answered from memory that it was a char #4. "I'm 97.6% sure."
All Gems are bottled at 108 proof, and the path there is short. By Dedman's numbers the whiskey comes off the still around 120 proof, goes into the barrel at 118 and comes out around 112, so it barely needs water to reach 108. The highest he's dumped was about 113. Several barrels came out under 108 and couldn't be bottled as Gem at all. If you put #76 next to another barrel, he said, you might find the same weight and texture, "but that's where it would stop."
Greg's note on #76 was "like velvet." Dedman's own taste has drifted lower over the years. He used to get excited about 120 and 130 proof. Now 105 to 115 is where he likes to drink.
Two more things he told us about Gem:
The name. The line was originally going to be called the Solitary Series. It became Gem of Kentucky as a throwback to an old blended Kentucky whiskey from just after Prohibition, one that some of his partners have a family connection to. We haven't found that story in print.
The bottle. It's all black. When he said he wanted that, he was told, "You can't put whiskey in an all-black bottle," because people want to see the liquid. His answer was to point at Clase Azul, which nobody buys for the view of the tequila. The design team found the bottles, and the objections stopped.
Barrel numbers have turned into a small treasure hunt. Cases ship with barrels mixed and nothing on the box to say which, he said, so 50 cases can hold nine different barrels. He once mentioned online that he loved barrel #81 and got 15 to 20 messages within a couple of hours asking where to find it. His other favorite, for the record, is #41.
| Bottle | Club and tier | Proof | How the second oak goes in |
|---|---|---|---|
| American Oak | Bourbon · Intro | 92 | Charred oak chain in the barrel, 10–12 months |
| Rapper's Delight: The Hip-Hop Blend | Bourbon · Explorer | 104 | Second new barrel, char #3 and #4, 9–12 months |
| Gem of Kentucky, barrel #76 | Bourbon · Enthusiast | 108 | Second new barrel, char #4 (Dedman, from memory) |
When we asked Dedman for a last word, he skipped the expensive bottles and went back to the one with the chain. Everyone wants to talk about the limited releases and the single barrels, he said, but in this market most people are looking for "that everyday approachable, I could take this home and be really happy with it" bottle.
2XO was founded by Dixon Dedman, a Kentucky blender who relaunched his family's Kentucky Owl brand in 2014. 2XO blends and finishes aged Kentucky bourbon; it does not disclose which distilleries make the whiskey.
Two Times Oak. Every 2XO whiskey gets a second exposure to new charred oak, either from a charred oak chain inserted into the barrel (the Oak Series) or, Dedman told us, from a second new barrel (the Collectibles Series and Gem of Kentucky).
2XO's single-barrel line: high-rye bourbon (35% rye) moved into a second new charred barrel, bottled at 108 proof, with the barrel number printed on the front label.
It is double-oaked without a second barrel. A chain of charred white oak cubes goes into the original barrel. Dedman told us it stays in for 10 to 12 months and that the chain's surface area equals the inside of a new 53-gallon barrel.
2XO lists maple syrup, caramel, brown sugar and baked apples with a mild peppery finish. Dedman calls it "a big caramel brown sugar bomb."
2XO ran across all three tiers of our Bourbon club in September: American Oak in Intro, Rapper's Delight in Explorer, and Gem of Kentucky barrel #76 in Enthusiast. See the Bourbon-of-the-Month Club.
