fermented and distilled, freshly made whiskeys are placed in cocoon-like barrels wherein they undergo periods of complicated metamorphosis. Once released from captivity in the aging warehouses, the world's whiskeys take the international stage as the most prized and expensive of all distillates. They are the monarch butterflies of the spirits category. They can be, and frequently are, great hooch, in other words.
One of whiskey's most enduring mysteries is why one can be so wildly dissimilar in character traits from another, not just from nation to nation or region to region, but even from barrel to barrel of the same batch. If all of the world's whiskeys are made from but a trio of commonplace, wholly familiar ingredients, how can they differ so markedly in personality? Moreover, why are a handful of the whiskey distillers more adept at the art of whiskey making than others? What are their secrets? I've been asking these questions for over three decades.
Three years ago, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., the Hoboken, New Jersey–based publisher of two previous books of mine, American Still Life (2003) and A Double Scotch (2005), contacted me, expressing an interest in backing another spirits-oriented business book. The topic choice, they said, was up to me. After some weeks of consideration deciding between proposing another book on Scotch whisky or one more on American whiskey, I settled on a subject that had all the earmarks of timeliness and pertinence: the meteoric rise in prominence of the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Along with a chapter and verse accounting of this distillery's emergence since before the nineteenth century, my other hope was to perhaps answer at least some of my queries about a few of whiskey's inherent riddles.
Wiley agreed to my proposal and the deal was struck. Upon informing the distillery operators about the project, I made arrangements to meet with their archivists to peruse their voluminous records. The top executives at Buffalo Trace at the time, namely CEO Mark Brown, public relations manager Amy Preske, master distiller Harlen Wheatley, master blender Drew Mayville, and former senior marketing director Kris Comstock (who departed early in 2021), have all known me long enough to know that I would allow the facts of the historical records as I unearthed them to dictate the trajectory of the story, warts and all. As with American Still Life and A Double Scotch, my independence would not permit a vanity project. They acknowledged that my views might in the end differ with theirs and to their credit offered me their assistance, encouragement, and direct access to the company archives. Nothing more.
As an active spirits critic, I have grown intimately familiar with the bourbon and rye whiskeys produced in abundance at their historic plant, which is now a celebrated landmark. As the research data unfolded over many months of examination, I became convinced that Buffalo Trace's history deserved to be told as much from the viewpoint of its low-bank location on the Kentucky River as from the intriguing lives of the people who created the legendary bourbon and rye whiskeys through the decades. The striking history of the distillery's site was, in my view, of paramount importance to the proper telling of the story. The tale of Buffalo Trace Distillery, I concluded early on, could not have occurred at any other place.
Consequently, reading after looking through the Glossary, which I suggest, you will find that the initial chapters have little to do with the bubbling of fermenting grain mash or the boiling of the mash's low-strength beer into high-alcohol distillate. The opening pages of Buffalo, Barrels, & Bourbon, nearly a fifth of the narrative, instead deals with the stark realities endured by the robust seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century Euro-American individuals who survived and persevered in the harsh, but green and lush North American environment. In this case, the focus lies on the uncharted, heavily forested area described first in maps as Kentucke. While beguiling to the eye and imagination, the deceptively feral soul of Kentucke forced hundreds of the earliest explorers, surveyors, military scouts, trappers, and fur traders to their knees in bruised submission. At least, it did for those fortunate ones who lived long enough to talk or write about it in journals.
The land itself where the Buffalo Trace Distillery campus stands today is a listed member of the National Register of Historic Places (#2428), one of a mere 2,600 such sites in the United States. This location in north-central Kentucky is the beneficiary of a geological and topographical majesty that must have been breathtaking to the first Euro-Americans who hacked their way through the midnight-dark primeval forests and paddled their pirogues down the swirling currents of the Kentucky River. It is here where the layers of sedentary substrata, the karst shelf geology, the trough-like sandy bank, pure spring water, the fertile, arable land for the growing of corn, and the strategic proximity to a major waterway, the Ohio River, all merge to create an ideal situation in which to make whiskey. Over time, the spilt blood of the pioneers, the heinous trials endured by the Native American tribes, and the near extinction of the dominant beast of the Great Plains, the buffalo, converged to create this saga about the taming of this virgin region and, later, about the distilling of legendary American whiskey.
After the low-bank location was settled with the building of crude riverside log structures, the storyline changes into a narrative that centers upon the multiple generations of influential clans, such as the Lees, Swigerts, Taylors, Staggs, Blantons, and Van Winkles. Painted with the main characters' foibles, peccadilloes, aspirations, failures, ingenuity, courage, and triumphs, Buffalo, Barrels, & Bourbon then warps into the chapters that uncover the evolution of some of America's most beloved whiskeys, the bourbons and ryes of Buffalo Trace.
The research and writing of this book took me back to places in time and space that I'd not visited to any significant degree for some years. It was grand to be immersed once again in the racehorse and whiskey fables of Kentucky's Bluegrass district. If bourbon whiskey is, as many believe, America's hallmark spirit, Kentucky is its cradle, its ancestral place of origin, its soul and vibrant inspiration.
F. PAUL PACULT
Hudson Valley, New York
Spring 2021
Glossary
IT WOULD BE UNFAIR to assume that everyone who picks up Buffalo, Barrels, & Bourbon will be sufficiently versed in the often arcane terminology related to whiskey and its production. Therefore, in the interest of leveling the linguistic playing field from the beginning, I am including this brief glossary upfront to assist in making better sense of some commonly utilized words in the American whiskey lexicon. Think of this as being your first sip.
Alcohol by volume Also known globally as “abv”; the international measure of how many milliliters (mL) of pure ethanol exist in 100 mL of a liquid at precisely 20 degrees Centigrade (68 degrees Fahrenheit). It's the ratio between alcohol and water. By the liter, then, a bottle that is identified as 43 percent alcohol also has 57 percent water. All American whiskeys are at least 40 percent alcohol by volume as decreed by statute.Barrel proof Whiskey that is bottled directly from the barrel and released at the full alcohol by volume strength, undiluted, meeting the truth-in-labeling requirements laid down by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, ruling 79-9.Blended whiskey Legal whiskeys that by American law are composed of a minimum of 20 percent straight whiskey and other spirits, most typically neutral grain spirits (NGS), in order to create a low-cost, high-volume whiskey.Bottled-in-bond In accordance with the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897, an American whiskey or spirit that comes from one distillation season (January–June or July–December), is then matured for at least four years in a federally bonded and supervised warehouse, and is bottled at 50 percent alcohol by volume. Most bottled-in-bond spirits are whiskey.Bourbon whiskey By law (Federal Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits, code 27 CFR §5.22(b)(1)(i)) must be made within the United States; must be at a minimum 51 percent corn; must be aged in new, charred oak containers; must be distilled not higher than 80 percent alcohol; must go into the aging barrel at no higher than 62.5 percent alcohol by volume; and must be bottled at no lower than 40 percent abv. Bourbon labeled as Straight Bourbon must, by law, be matured in new, charred oak containers for
