Buffalo Trace doesn’t open up its archives and plant operations to just anyone. Good thing F. Paul Picault isn’t just anyone. One of America’s preeminent spirits journalists, Picault has forgotten more about the spirits world than most will ever know, and is exactly the right person to take on the massive endeavor of writing a definitive history on how the Buffalo Trace Distillery came to be.
Many books have written about aspects of the storied distilleries and colorful personalities producing ground breaking bourbon at the historic location just off the Kentucky River. However, none have so artfully woven together a coherent through line from the early pioneers settling the Kentucky wilderness to the modern day distillery. Buffalo, Barrels, and Bourbon: The Story of How Buffalo Trace Distillery Became the World’s Most Awarded Distillery, fully captures the story of Buffalo Trace in an approachable way and is a must read for anyone interested in bourbon history.
Picault begins at the beginning: the buffalos. For those still wondering how Buffalo Trace got its name, hundreds of years ago America was brimming with buffalo. The great beasts traveled together in herds across the grassy landscape and over years of migration wore down trails across the landscape alternatively known as “traces.” The place where the modern distillery sits today was once, long ago, a well-known crossing point for buffalos across the Kentucky River.
While the name Buffalo Trace is a more contemporary marketing effort to connect the distillery’s bourbon with the past, the distillery’s history and connection to the land is real. Picault paints a vivid portrait of early America’s expansion West into the area now known as Kentucky, and the impact of steamships and riverine trade on a young, growing town called Frankfort on the banks of the Kentucky River; and of the first efforts to distill on the Frankfort site now occupied by Buffalo Trace.
Sifting through the impact of the Civil War on the bourbon economy and consumer tastes, Picault artfully tells the familiar story of E.H. Taylor over three chapters, capturing his time as a failed banker to his sympathies for and profiteering from the confederacy, a complicated visionary of his times riding the waves of boom and bust. And then on to the fortunes made, lost, and reallocated during the prohibition years, with corporate titan Lewis Rosentiel bullishly buying defunct whiskey assets in anticipation of the return of liquor to America.
Despite an explosion in post-WWII bourbon sales to sate a thirsty army returning from Europe, by the late 1960s bourbon had flown too close to the sun, and, aside from master moves by a handful of whiskey mavericks, the 1970s and 1980s were lean years of survival. Two of those mavericks, Elmer T. Lee and Ferdie Falk, gambled on Blanton’s, the world’s first single barrel whiskey – a gamble that would have a lasting impact on the entire industry for decades to come.
As Picault tackles the post-Sazerac sale era of the distillery and Mark Brown’s reign over the company in the later chapters, he also tackles a lesser-known but fascinating topic: Ronnie Eddins and the Buffalo Trace Bourbon Experimental Whiskey Program, in which Buffalo Trace has invested considerable resources over the years. In the late 1990s, Eddins, a former warehouse manger with a gift for understanding the nuances of barrel aging, commissioned 192 barrels from 96 white oak trees to gauge how whiskey would react under combinations of seven distinct factors (Length of barrel stave seasoning, variety of warehouse, char level, etc).
The resulting Single Oak Project, focused on wood and aging, provided Buffalo Trace with invaluable data for their whiskey production, which has been described as the Human Genome Project of the whiskey world. This effort was followed but he Single Estate Project focus on growing different types of grain, and the Warehouse X Project, which examines the impact of the environment (humidity, airflow, sunlight, etc) on whiskey production. As Picault notes, only a company like Buffalo Trace could pull off these types of cutting edge undertaking.
For Picault, the story of Buffalo Trace is about the people that chased the dream of building a better bourbon. His depictions of the people and relationships that defined bourbon history lay the ground work for how Buffalo Trace Distillery came to be the producers of America’s most coveted whiskies.
It is truly remarkable that in guiding the reader through over 300 years of history Picault is able to maintain a focused, relevant narrative centered on the how the legendary Buffalo Trace Distillery emerged from an undeveloped patch of land on the banks of the Kentucky River. As Buffalo Trace forecasts for the next 100 years of bourbon production, Picault can feel confident about his contribution to the Buffalo Trace Story and another noteworthy addition to the records of whiskey literature.
