The Antique Collection is also distributed in the fall. Bottles of Pappy are allocated October 1 and typically hit shelves mid-October to early December. Remember that if you’re looking for something (especially a Buffalo Trace Distillery whiskey), others are too - they don’t have to give you information, but they may be more inclined to do so if you’re a regular.īeyond that, know your release periods. Ask when they usually get the bottle you’re hunting for and reward information with your patronage. Frequent the shops in your area and talk to the person behind the counter.
Your best shot at nabbing prized bottles boils down to being a good customer, which starts with communication. This is done to ensure retailers, restaurants and consumers in every state get a shot at some.
How to Score BottlesĪll Buffalo Trace Distillery whiskeys are distributed “on allocation.” This means there’s a specific number of bottles allocated to each state throughout the year across its whole catalog.
Dating back to 2000, Buffalo Trace and Eagle Rare - the brand’s two most available brands - have earned more awards than are worth counting. While all those names carry weight with collectors and award show judges, its humbler mainline bottles are no less noble. Taylor and Blanton’s are some of the most sought-after bottles of brown on the planet, and that’s before mentioning the coveted Antique Collection and O.F.C. The whiskey landscape is run almost entirely by a handful of conglomerates and mega-corporations, and Buffalo Trace Distillery stands out. If you want to understand what a fair price for any of Buffalo Trace's marquis bottles is, tools like BoozApp or accounts like Overpriced Bourbon on Instagram are good starting points. In fact, due to explosive bottle demand, Facebook has become something of a haven for whiskey's black markets - a place to buy the hard-to-find bourbon drinkers crave, albeit for many times the retail price. Upon the release of the high-end Wellers and all the Van Winkle Collection, Buffalo Trace has gone as far to warn hunters of predatory pricing, and encourages them to report it to local liquor authorities. In an honest world, you’d be able to find one for as low as $60. Take Pappy, a brand with bottle prices that climb well into the four-digit realm. The distillery distributes all of its whiskey with longstanding suggested retail prices (SRP). These brands are allocated in limited quantities and have immense, dedicated followings. Weller can cost hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of dollars, if you can even find them.
Rye Mashbill: mash made with a little more than 50 percent rye (Sazerac) Pricingīottles from brands Pappy Van Winkle and W.L. Wheated Mashbill: replaces rye content with wheat (Pappy Van Winkle, Weller) Mash #2: a higher-rye bourbon mash (Blanton’s, Ancient Age) Mash #1: a low-rye bourbon mash (Buffalo Trace, Eagle Rare, E.H. Some one-off expressions - like Van Winkle’s Family Reserve Rye - are exceptions to the rule. So we know which bottles start as which mashbills, but we don’t know specific percentages of each ingredient.
The catch? The distillery has marked the exact balance of barley, corn, wheat and rye as proprietary (though many try to crack the code). In whiskey-making patois, recipe means mashbill, or the specific levels of corn, malt, rye and barley combined to distill the beginnings of every bottle. All Buffalo Trace whiskey comes from one of four recipes.