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; 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…