During the bourbon boom of the past several years, a lot of our favorite bottles have become nearly impossible to find — at least without paying highly inflated prices on the secondary market. And it just so happens that many of the hardest bottles to track down come out of the Buffalo Trace Distillery, with bourbons such as Weller, Blanton’s, Eagle Rare and especially anything from Pappy Van Winkle all reaching near-mythic status. But that could soon change, as Buffalo Trace recently doubled production of its whiskeys.
How is Buffalo Trace doubling whiskey production?
Back in February of 2023, the brand opened a new stillhouse that’s 40 feet tall and capable of producing 60,000 gallons of whiskey a day. It’s a duplicate of the distillery’s existing still, and Buffalo Trace itself said in a press release that this will allow them to double production on “Buffalo Trace, Eagle Rare, Weller, Blanton’s, E.H. Taylor Jr. and the rest of the whiskeys in its portfolio.”
The new stillhouse is perhaps the most impressive achievement thus far in an ongoing $1.2 billion expansion at the distillery that began in 2015 and had already resulted in a 50% increase in supply over the five years preceding the opening of the duplicate stillhouse last year. Now, those numbers will be pushed considerably higher, as the new stillhouse is resulting in all-time-high levels of whiskey production at Buffalo Trace.
There’s more to the expansion than just the stillhouse
In the year since the new stillhouse opened, work has continued on the distillery’s expansion and Buffalo Trace is currently building a new boiler house that will feature two new steam boilers and eight 95,000-gallon fermenters, a 33 percent increase in the distillery’s total number of fermenters.
A rep from the brand tells me that 75 percent of the expansion project has been completed as of March 2024, and they’re currently in the third and final phase of the expansion, with plans to finish entirely by early 2025.
In addition to the new still house and new boiler house, the expansion thus far has seen the production of a new distribution center, a new bottling operation, a new dry house, a new mill house, four new cookers, new process cooling systems, a new wastewater treatment facility, an expanded visitors center, an upgraded cistern room with three new 75,000-gallon cistern tanks and, last but absolutely not least, 19 new aging warehouses — all of which are currently at full capacity and aging 58,800 barrels of whiskey each.
