Matt: 0:00

Welcome to Alcohology.

Unfiltered Studios Announcer Guy: 0:03

I wonder why they call it a cocktail.

Matt: 0:05

Yes, I'd like to know more about the Venus Venifera. I'm very interested in the terwata.

Unfiltered Studios Announcer Guy: 0:10

We talking about two carbon, six hydrogen, and one oxygen atom. We talking about half of alcohol.

Matt: 0:17

This episode: Buffalo Trace. If you go back a few thousand years, the Kentucky River Valley wasn't home to distillers or farmers. It was home to buffalo. Enormous prehistoric herds that carved deep paths across the landscape, the same paths they walked generation after generation. These trails were called traces, and one of those traces led straight to a natural river crossing in Frankfurt, Kentucky. Fast forward to 1775. The U.S. isn't even a country yet, and some settlers realize this buffalo crossing is the perfect spot for farming and milling. And where there's grain, there's always one guy who says, hey, we should ferment that. That's how the very first documented distilling began on the land where Buffalo Trace sits today, and those guys were Hancock Lee and his brother Willis Lee. By 1812, a proper distillery was built by Harrison Blanton, and over the next several decades, the site bounces between owners who upgrade the equipment, build better warehouses, and occasionally burn it down. Because in the 1800s everything caught fire at least twice a year. But the place kept rebuilding, kept refining, and kept producing. And then, in the 1870s, Bourbon gets his first true reformer, Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor, Jr. Yep, E.H. Taylor. Taylor buys the distillery and renames it OFC, Old Fire Copper. He also decides that whiskey making should be a science, not a port in the barrel and prey kind of situation. He modernizes the distillery, pushes for federal standards, and becomes one of the loudest voices demanding quality in American spirits. He is a major reason we know what's in our bottles today. Eventually, the distillery ends up in the hands of businessman George T. Stag, who renames the distillery after himself, industrializes the operation, expands the plant, and installs steam heat in the warehouses, which is likely the first climate-controlled whiskey aging in America. He turns the distillery into one of the biggest and most advanced distilleries in the world. Then prohibition hits. In 1920, nearly every distillery in America goes dark, boarded up, padlocked, silent, no more fun. But this one survives. Why? Two magic words. Medicinal whiskey. Personally, I think that under the right circumstances, all whiskey is medicinal, but I digress. Federal law at the time allowed for a handful of distilleries to keep producing whiskey from medical prescriptions, and this site was one of only six in the entire US that stayed open. Doctors handed out whiskey for everything from colds, anxiety to the flu, headaches, general weakness, or my baby is teething and I'm losing my mind. Because of that loophole distills kept running, the distillery stayed alive, and today Buffalo Trace can legitimately claim to be the oldest continually operating distillery in the nation. After Prohibition, after the Depression, after war rationing, the distillery continued evolving, and in the mid-20th century hired a young World War II radar bombardier named Elmer T. Lee. Elmer approached whiskey like a mathematician. He studied warehouse dynamics, aging patterns, and flavor chemistry long before flavor chemistry was even a phrase. In 1984, he created something revolutionary: Blanton's Single Barrel Bourbon, the first mainstream single barrel bourbon product. Elmer said, What if we celebrate a barrel's individual character instead of hiding it? He named it after his old mentor, Albert B. Blanton, and in the process he accidentally created bourbon collector culture as we know it. Blanton's became a phenomenon, and the idea of a premium single barrel bourbon spread like wildfire. Then, in 1992, the Sazerac Company spoofs in and buys the whole operation. Seven years later, in 1999, they release a brand new flagship, Buffalo Trace Bourbon. A tribute to the old Buffalo Trail, where the whole history began. From there, the brand exploded. Suddenly, Buffalo Trace becomes the center of a whole bourbon universe. WL Weller with its soft weeded mash pills that people now call Baby Pappy, Eagle Rare, the elegant, well-aged classic, George T. Stag, the barrel-proof monster that sends collectors into a frenzy, Elmer T. Lee, which was created as a tribute to the man himself and presented to him at his retirement, and let's not forget Pappy Van Winkle, which the distillery produces for the Van Winkle family, a partnership that launched the most famously rare bourbon brand in America. Suddenly, bourbon isn't just a drink, it's a status symbol. But here's where we leave history and enter modern mystery. Why is this stuff so hard to find? Why can't you walk into a store and grab a bottle of Buffalo Trace like you would any other $30 to $50 bourbon? Well, here's the truth. Bourbon takes time. Buffalo Trace bourbon is widely believed to be aged somewhere between 6 to 10 years. Eagle Rare is 10 years, Weller and Pappy spend over a decade relaxing in oak absorbing the flavor. That means every bottle on the shelf today was a gamble someone took a decade ago. Now mix that with a massive bourbon boom for the last 10 years, a boom nobody saw coming. Demand skyrocketed, new drinkers, collectors, flippers, cocktail bars, TikTok reviewers, everyone, myself included, wanted Buffalo Trace all at once. The distillery is expanding, and not in small ways. They've poured more than a billion dollars into new warehouses, more fermenters, a second still house, and huge bottling lines. But even new whiskey needs time. You can't rush oak no matter how much money you throw at it. There's also allocation, the system where stores only get a limited amount of certain bottles. Even the Buffalo Trace gift shop has to buy from a distributor like everybody else, meaning they can sell out of their daily stock in minutes, even limiting certain bottles to one person every few months. And because supply can't keep up with demand, the secondary market, the online gray market turns $40 into $120 bottles, $60 bottles into $300 bottles, and 15-year Pappy into a down payment on a used car. It's not a conspiracy, it's what happens when slow-age whiskey meets modern consumer madness. But the wild part is, through all the chaos, Buffalo Trace keeps leaning into science and history. They built Warehouse X, a research building designed to test how temperature, light, airflow, and humidity affect bourbon. They've been experimenting with different barrel types, different woods, and even new uses for whiskey waste, like turning spent grain into suitable foods. The distillery's historical significance was recognized in 2013 when it was awarded National Historic Landmark status. Putting it in the same league as Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, and the Hoover Dam, except none of those places give you tasty samples at the end of the tour. Floods, they've survived them. Fires, survive those too. Changing tastes, recessions, prohibition, survived it all. And today, when you hold a bottle of Buffalo Trace, Eagle Rare, Weller, Blantons, Stag, Elmer T. Lee, or any of its cousins, you're holding not just a bourbon, you're holding 250 years of American distilling history. A history shaped by Buffalo Trails, Frontier settlers, obsessive scientists, ambitious businessmen, and millions of impatient customers feverishly refreshing their liquor store's webpage every morning. So the next time you score a bottle, remember you didn't just buy bourbon, you bought a story. One that started with a herd of buffalo and continues with the bottle you are holding. This has been Alcohology, Buffalo Trace classes dismissed. Drink your homework responsibly. This stuff is delicious and really damn hard to find.

Unfiltered Studios Announcer Guy: 7:11

This podcast is a production of Unfiltered Studios. If you would like to know more about joining Unfiltered Studios, please visit our website at unfpod.com for more information.

Matt: 7:22

Would you like to visit the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Kentucky? Give our sponsor, the Poppins Travel Company, a call at 407-494-4070, or visit them at Poppins Travel Company.com. Would you like to suggest something for us to drink, give us some feedback, or have your brand featured on Matt Friends Drink the Universe? We would love to hear from all of our listeners. Please check our episode descriptions down below for links to send us a text, support the podcast, and visit our merge store. To keep up with our latest news or share your stellar sips with us, please like and follow Matt Friends DTU on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Threads, Blue Sky, and Reddit. For more information about the podcast and links to all of our episodes, please visit www.matfriendsdtu.com. That's mat and friendsdU.com. Cheers, friends!