Enough About Pappy Already, Weller Is American Whiskey Royalty Too

If there’s any single brand that encapsulates the frenzied surge in popularity of bourbon over the last ten years not named Pappy Van Winkle, it’s Weller.

It’s always stood in my top three bourbon brands, partly because I enjoy wheated bourbons but also because of the label’s dogged commitment to consistency and value. From a pure vanity POV, Weller’s packaging design has likewise always been tastefully understated and cohesive. Few bottle series look better or more cohesive when grouped on a bar shelf than Weller’s core line. 

Given this context, I was shocked to see the brand announce a new Weller Millennium offering this week. It’s an uber-exclusive bottling with a breathtaking MSRP of $7,500 that’ll ship in June. It’s also not a bourbon. 

Instead, it features a blend of old straight wheated bourbons and wheat whiskeys initially distilled in 2000, 2003, 2005 and 2006. It’s packaged in a 750ml handcrafted crystal decanter with a custom-made hand-etched crystal topper that’s befitting of premium liquid inside and very much in line with Weller’s general design language. 

Buffalo Trace Distillery

And yet, it also includes a massive white display case that would look far more at home in a department store perfume section than a whisky bar. 

So how did Weller go from making beloved yet widely available bourbons to releasing one of the most expensive American whiskeys ever in less than 20 years? And what does it signal for the label moving forward?

Answering those questions requires a history lesson first. 

It started with a unique legacy and focus that few whiskey brands could match.

The Weller brand is relatively new, at least in the whiskey world, though the Weller name has been associated with wheated whiskey for nearly two centuries. It’s short for William Larue Weller, who is widely credited as the first distiller to commercialize wheated whiskey in the mid-1800s. 

Like all bourbons, wheated bourbons must be made from at least 51% corn, although corn is an even larger component in many cases. However, unlike most bourbons that allocate more of the remaining recipe to barley or rye, wheat makes up a more significant proportion of the mash bill. By increasing the wheat content, generally at the expense of bolder, peppery-flavored rye, many, including myself, feel that “wheaters” offer a sweeter and smoother flavor profile. 

Buffalo Trace Distillery

Buffalo Trace acquired the brand in 1999. Shortly after, the Weller’s lineup consisted of four bottles and remained that way for over a decade. 

The three mainstays — Weller Special Reserve, a higher 107-proof  Weller Antique, and an aged Weller 12 — cost less than $50 and were relatively easy to buy as recently as the early 2010s. 

With the launch of the immediately coveted Buffalo Trace Antique Collection (BTAC) in 2000, premium iterations bearing the longer William Larue Weller namesake were added to the Weller family. Originally, they sold for ~$100. Their MSRP has since changed to $125. 

An association with Pappy Van Winkle and an explosion in bourbon popularity eventually sent demand for Weller’s entire lineup to the stratosphere. 

As Pappy Van Winkle became the white whale of American spirits, its fame started rubbing off on Weller. 

That’s because Weller and Pappy Van Winkle are uniquely intertwined, going way back in fact. William Larue Weller actually gave Julian P. Van Winkle Senior, a.k.a “Pappy,” a job as a whiskey salesman in 1893. That same Pappy went on to purchase Weller’s W.L. Weller & Sons, as it was known then from Weller in 1908. 

Working at Weller also at least partially inspired Julian to make his namesake bourbon using a wheated mash bill. As a result, many believe the younger Pappy bottlings have shared somewhat similar flavor profiles to Weller, especially Weller 12.

In 2022, a joint venture between Buffalo Trace and the Van Winkle family also made Buffalo Trace the official distiller of Pappy Van Winkle, creating yet another similarity between the two labels. 

These connections and a viral bourbon “hack” that blended Weller 12 and Antique to create a so-called “poor man’s Pappy” led many to view the Weller brand as potentially the next Pappy Van Winkle. 

The impact of this new perspective on Weller was dramatic.

In 2014, the average price of Weller 12 on the legal market was $47, according to the online alcohol search tool Wine-Searcher. By 2019, it was $238. In 2023, it was $330. Over the same period, every offering in the Weller lineup experienced a similar massive rise in popularity.

In 2019, Buffalo Trace began expanding the Weller line while still following the label’s proven playbook.

To the company’s credit, Buffalo Trace recognized that it potentially had the next most widely recognized premium bourbon brand in the making. And unlike many of its competitors, the parent company exercised remarkable tact in slowly fortifying the label’s grassroots reputation for both consistency and value in admittedly creative and production-savvy ways. 

In October 2015, the company launched an interactive website that allowed fans to craft their perfect bourbon by selecting various aspects, including the mash bill recipe, the whiskey-making technique, the oak barrel type, where it would be warehoused, how long it would age and even its final proof. Two years later, Buffalo Trace brought the crowdsourced results to life in the form of a new addition to the Weller family – the so-called Weller CYPB, short for Craft Your Perfect Bourbon.

In late 2019, Weller Full Proof was also added as a limited new annual release, followed by the introduction of Weller Single Barrel in June 2022.

While each of these offerings was unique in its own way, Buffalo Trace kept the MSRP of all of these new offerings extremely reasonable. Weller CYPB’s MSRP was just $39.99, while Full Proof and Single Barrel each were set at $50. 

Unfortunately, like all other Weller offerings before them, they started selling at much higher premiums on the secondary market and quickly became virtually impossible to find. 

In 2023, Weller made its first bolder and riskier push into ultra-premium bourbon.

Things changed for the Weller brand with the launch of Daniel Weller in 2023. 

The new release was positioned as an experimental line that could potentially shift dramatically over time. The first iteration was made with Emmer wheat grain in Buffalo Trace’s custom E.H. Taylor, Jr. microstill. This smaller unit combines a pot and column still to allow the company to produce smaller runs of whiskey without disturbing the core line. 

After years of publicly pushing against the rapid markups of the wider bourbon industry, Buffalo Trace’s stated MSRP of $500 for Daniel Weller was a letdown to many bourbon enthusiasts. In many ways, it was the first clear signal that Buffalo Trace could no longer ignore a strategy that had worked so well for its competitors. 

Buffalo Trace Distillery

It was also the first time the brand had seemingly ever faced questions from the bourbon community questioning a bottle of Weller’s value proposition, at least based on its stated MSRP. 

Eric Harman at Breaking Bourbon wrote that Daniel Weller was “the most balanced and most elegant” of Weller’s offerings. He also added that most who tried it wouldn’t “come away from a single sip saying, “Wow!”

Bourbon Culture’s assessment was harsher. “The most important question on everyone’s mind when it comes to Daniel Weller is—Is the $500 price tag worth it? My immediate answer is no,” Mike F wrote. Later, he added, “I won’t be overly dramatic and call this bourbon undrinkable or anything like that. I will call it an obvious letdown when I consider the price and rarity and see how hard some people are trying to get a bottle.”

For the record, we acknowledged the release as one of the most innovative spirit launches of 2023 as part of our annual GP100. 

Though I haven’t tasted Daniel Weller, I have been fortunate to try many ultra-premium whiskeys over the years. And in every one of those instances, I never tasted anything that genuinely felt “worth” paying ten times the asking prices of plenty of other fine whiskeys on the market. 

Don’t get me wrong, many were excellent, delicious whiskeys. But none were at all proportionally so superior to other options where their asking prices made sense.

This, to me, is the rub with all ultra-premium spirits. At some point, steep price tags set tasting expectations impossibly high.

Buffalo Trace’s savvy business executives and master distillers likely understand this notion better than most, which makes the decision to follow up with Daniel Weller and Weller Millennium all the more ballsy. 

Where does the Weller brand go from here?

Personally, I can’t remember the last time I was this torn over a whiskey release, which is odd given how unobtainable Weller Millennium is by its very nature. 

As someone who enjoys uniqueness and experimentation in whiskey, I appreciate the peerless nature of this bottling. And when you’ve made as much whiskey as Buffalo Trace master distiller Harlen Wheatley, the appeal to try something genuinely different is probably tough to ignore. 

Also, as a long-time fan of the Weller brand, I’m happy to see Buffalo Trace boldly positioning the label as one of the premier brands in American whiskey because its excellence is long over due for recognition from more than just whiskey fanatics.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel confused by this move in particular. Weller’s reputation has always centered on delivering enormous value, creating fantastic wheated bourbons that consistently wowed relative to their MSRP. 

Buffalo Trace Distillery

According to the press release for Weller Millennium, the idea of setting aside some of Buffalo Trace’s early wheat whiskey distillations after acquiring the Weller brand in 1999 was all part of the plan. That tracks given how much the whiskey industry tends to think ahead about time-related milestones and anniversaries.

If that plan had ultimately resulted in releasing the finest bottle of old wheated bourbon on the planet, topping the likes of the Weller’s own William Larue Weller bottles and even Pappy Van Winkle 25 for deliciousness and notoriety, it would have made total sense to me, even if the MSRP was well over $2,500 or even $4,000. 

But something about making a statement via a $7,500(!) non-bourbon (!)  just feels off in some ways, at least for a brand like Weller. 

Whether Weller’s two recent moves into the ultra-premium bourbon space were the ideal approach is something I and other whiskey nerds will be debating over pours for years to come, or at least until the next Weller release hits. What’s no longer up for debate is this: the days of Weller needing to lean on being “the poor man’s Pappy” for street cred are over. 

While it hasn’t buried its way into the cultural zeitgeist like Pappy Van Winkle, Buffalo Trace clearly believes that Weller deserves a prime seat at the table of elite American whiskey brands. And I couldn’t agree with them more. If it takes a $7,500 bottle of wheat whiskey for others to see things the same way, then so be it. 

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