FRANKFORT — By the time the doors opened at 9 a.m. on a recent Friday, at least 300 guests were already waiting outside Buffalo Trace Distillery.
As people snaked through the queue, my mind wandered to the excitement around the midnight release of "The Phantom Menace" in 1999 or the seventh "Harry Potter" book in 2007.
Make no mistake, this is a cultural phenomenon for bourbon lovers. But it was also just another day at the Kentucky bourbon distillery.
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Without fail, a few hundred people appear every morning at Buffalo Trace, 113 Great Buffalo Trace in Frankfort, eager to purchase a bottle of Blanton’s ($74.99), E.H. Taylor, Jr. Small Batch ($59.99), Eagle Rare ($42.99) or Weller Special Reserve ($30). All four bottles are difficult to find on liquor store shelves, but if you head to the distillery gift shop in the morning, usually at least one of them will be available for purchase.
Lately, they've had more than one available, which up until the last six months or so would have been like scoring tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour and the Superbowl in the same day.
Amid a heatwave in late June, I spotted a strong mix of license plates in the parking lot. Some folks had traveled from as far as Illinois, Pennsylvania and Florida for a chance to purchase four relatively hard-to-find bottles of bourbon.
One man lugged a camp chair and a laptop from his car and he settled into a spot about 30-deep into the line. He’d clearly done this before. Josh Crom, who works at a liquor store in Madison, Wisconsin, was posted up at the front of the line with five of his buddies from college. Even with his connections in alcohols sales, he told me he can't find a reasonably priced bottle of Blanton’s in Wisconsin to add to his personal collection. The best way to nab one is to travel 500 miles to Buffalo Trace, and hope it's one of the allocated spirits while he's in town.
This was the group's second bourbon trip together, and they had one bourbon enthusiast with them who knew this line phenomenon well.
But there are rules to this ritual.
- Each Buffalo Trace shopper is only allowed one bottle of each of these allocated spirits per visit.
- There are plenty of digital tools that guess what might be for sale on the day you’re going, but you’ll never really know for sure until the morning of your visit.
- Once you buy one of these rare yet attainable bourbons, in most cases, you must wait another 90 days to purchase that label again from Buffalo Trace. The gift shop staff scans driver’s licenses to ensure no visitor is taking more than their fair share.
And the more I’ve watched this phenomenon and, candidly, even participated in it myself over the years, the more I’ve wondered, why?
Chuck Guglielmo, the owner of Unfiltered KY Tours, told me that “it’s a big deal to take something home from Buffalo Trace.”
The Frankfort distillery is by far the most frequently requested among his bourbon clients.
There’s something different about Buffalo Trace that breeds an undeniable loyalty.
While the line ebbs and flows in size along with the bourbon tourism season, it’s become a staple at the distillery. This summer I decided to figure out why.
Why is Buffalo Trace bourbon so hard to find?
One thing that’s even more remarkable than the daily spectacle is that Buffalo Trace never set out to have a line like this at all.
“This is a making of the consumers own desire,” Matt Higgins, Buffalo Trace’s director of guest experiences, told me. “We didn’t encourage anybody to line up.”
The fandom really began picking up in 2013 alongside the Kentucky bourbon boom, Higgins explained. The launch of the period drama "Mad Men" in 2007 gave bourbon an air of sophistication, and a dynamic marketing push in the beginning of the 21st century boosted the bourbon travel industry. Up until that point, Buffalo Trace could usually keep some aged spirits on the shelf throughout the day.
That year, Higgins specifically recalls a customer who tried to buy a whole case of Eagle Rare. He realized that if every guest tried to do that, more and more people would leave the distillery disappointed.
So that’s how the one bottle per day rule was born.
“We implemented daily limits, and that wasn’t enough to handle the demand verse the supply we were getting,” Higgins told me. “There were days where we’d sell out of every bit of aged product we had.”
All the while, more and more fans began calling the distillery trying to pinpoint what day that week Blanton’s would be on the gift shop shelves. When the distillery staff noticed that they were seeing the same faces day-after-day, they implemented the 90-day rule on Blanton’s in early 2020.
The crowds had been coming to Buffalo Trace for years at that point, but it was really the COVID-19 pandemic that created the formality of the line. The 90-day rule eventually expanded to include Eagle Rare, E.H. Taylor and Weller, too.
If Higgins had it his way, no one would ever leave Buffalo Trace without their favorite bottle of bourbon, but since the aged spirits take years to complete, it's taken more than a decade for the supply to even closely reach the demand inside the the gift shop.
“You’re starting to see the impact of that investment show up on the shelves,” Higgins told me. “This is the very start of that shifting tide.”
In the last six months or so, Higgins told me, they’ve had enough of a supply to occasionally offer “holidays” from the 90-day rule. As the stock has increased, most days guests have a chance to purchase at least two of the allocated spirits, if not three or all four.
Lately the highly sought-after bottles are available into the early afternoon. Somedays, the aged bourbon stays on shelves all day, which would have been unthinkable just two years ago.
“I’m the head of hospitality and I hate saying no to people,” Higgins told me. “So now we’re seeing the flip side of it, and a lot of surprise and delight opportunities.”
What bourbon is available today at Buffalo Trace?
There is no shortage of Buffalo Trace fan groups on the internet, but perhaps one of the most well-known is Buffalo Trace Daily.
Its website and social media pages announce the spirits available each day and use an algorithm to break down the odds on what might be on the shelves the next day. For example, the morning The Courier Journal visited the distillery in June Buffalo Trace Daily projected a 53.27% chance for Weller, 34.35% for E.H. Taylor, 11.69% for Eagle Rare and 0.69% for Blanton’s.
Mike Danhauer of Lexington is the mastermind behind the method, and he has about four years of data driving his predictions. Danhauer is not a social media enthusiast by any means, he said. He’s more of a numbers guy. Most days he can’t believe that his data project annually draws in hundreds of thousands of visitors to his website and more than a million views.
People are really into the culture around Buffalo Trace, though.
“Pretty much the only way you can find Blanton’s and E.H. Taylor is either a secondary person or going to the distillery and getting it at retail price,” he told me, when we spoke over the phone in the days before my visit. “There is definitely a thrill of the hunt.”
Blanton’s — with its elegant, round bottle and eight gold collectable toppers, which spell out B-L-A-N-T-O-N'-S — tends to be the big prize among visitors, Guglielmo told me. So much so, that he takes extra precautions with his tour vehicles in the hottest months of the year to ensure the regal wax seals don't melt and ruin the bottle.
“All the (allocated) products are entry level to becoming a bourbon connoisseur, they have name recognition,” he explained, as he talked me through what he has learned from his tour guests. “They’ve heard so many people say that Blanton’s is their favorite kind of bourbon, that it turns into a bit of an echo chamber.”
A few weeks ago, I unwittingly found a reference to Blanton’s in Season 1 Episode 7 of NBC’s "Blindspot." After a character is freed from FBI detainment, he turns to his girlfriend and says “Well, I think it’s time we open that Blanton’s your uncle gave you."
That off-hand comment subtly nods to the celebratory and rare nature of the spirit.
That same level of intrigue builds when bourbon newcomers hear their friends talk about trying to collect all eight toppers. Many of Guglielmo’s tour guests have friends and family who encourage them to bring home a bottle of Blanton’s. That rhetoric adds to the elusiveness of the products and the appeal of the brand.
“They've done such a good job with marketing and with word of mouth,” Guglielmo told me. “It’s built such a cult following that people know what to do.”
'It's so exciting'
The Buffalo Trace cult following hasn’t entirely shifted its habits to match this relatively new surge in supply.
Even though the shelves tend to stay stocked into the early afternoon, a couple hundred people or so still line up most mornings in the summer. Many folks make Buffalo Trace their first stop in a day packed with bourbon tours. The distillery rarely offers the same allocated spirit two days in a row, which can encourage one final stop at the distillery as visitors head out of town.
Some, like Chris Russey, are relatively local and build in time to stop by the distillery on their way to somewhere else. He lives in Lexington, but this summer he’s teaching college algebra and pre-calculus at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. He’s waited in the line at least 30 times over the years, he told me as he sat in a camp chair and worked from his laptop.
He’s already collected all eight Blanton’s toppers. Once he drinks his way through those bottles, he’s eligible for a coveted prize. If he returns his toppers to the distillery, Buffalo Trace will mount them on a handsome looking bourbon stave and ship it to his home.
The stave is a tell-tale sign of a Buffalo Trace fan.
Needless to say, he already had enough Blanton’s in his collection, he told me, smiling. His stock is large enough at this point that he’d had the chance to buy the highly sought-after product the day before and opted not to. The morning we met, he was hoping for Eagle Rare.
A little further back, Richard and Lyndsi McDermitt of Grove City, Ohio, were three-time veterans of the line, and this time they’d traveled with their aunt and uncle, Rosemary and Mark Weiher. The reason for the trip was simple.
“It’s superb,” Mark Weiher said excitedly. “It’s perfect. It’s the best.”
“I like the whole drop thing,” Lynsdi McDermitt continued, referring to the mystery behind the availability. “It’s so exciting, it’s like ‘what are we going to get?'"
They’d been hoping for Eagle Rare in the days leading up to their trip, but the ever-growing rumor mill among fans at the campground where they were staying had tempered their expectations.
Perhaps, rightfully so. A few minutes later, word trickled down the line that E.H. Taylor and Weller Special Reserve were the allocations for the day.
I grinned as I heard this. Buffalo Trace Daily’s prediction for that morning was spot on.
The Grove City Group wasn’t too disappointed, though. They only know of one liquor store back home that sometimes has Buffalo Trace products, and those don’t last long on the shelves. They were going to come home with more Buffalo Trace products from one day of waiting in line than they’d be able to find all year.
Although, candidly, they expected at least one of the bottles wouldn’t make it back to Ohio.
“We’ll probably be sharing it around the campground,” Mark Weiher said.
As the doors opened and the line started moving at 9 a.m., I followed the crowd past the check-in and into the gift shop.
This part of the ritual is always a little jaw-dropping for me.
Having only ever found one bottle of E.H. Taylor outside of the distillery, it’s almost jarring to stand in a room packed with hundreds of its signature yellow canisters. A bourbon fan could check every liquor story in the state and still come up empty handed.
But here at the distillery, you're right in the center of the motherload.
When I left the distillery at 9:45 a.m., there were still more than 100 people waiting. Hundreds more would trickle into the gift shop throughout the rest of the day.
It’s like Guglielmo said, “it’s a big deal to bring something home from Buffalo Trace.”
And as I watched clearly thrilled fans stream out of the distillery and load those coveted yellow canisters into cars from Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin, I couldn’t help but agree with him.
Reach features columnist Maggie Menderski at mmenderski@courier-journal.com.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: 300 people in line? How hard-to-find bourbons made Buffalo Trace Distillery a cult favorite
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