viewpoints. Both the Filson Historical Society and the Kentucky Historical Society deserve a tip of my hat for their very existence, as well as the assistance their archives provided throughout the book's research period. Never standing in the way of where my independent research was leading me, the management and public relations teams at Buffalo Trace deserve shout-outs for their no-strings-attached cooperation, fully cognizant that my findings might in the end differ with their own data. A special note of appreciation goes to Buffalo Trace archivist Madison Sevilla, whose patience and diligence were pivotal in pointing out directions for deeper research. I would be remiss if I didn't note and acknowledge American whiskey historian Carolyn Brooks for sharing her superb investigative paper, “A Leestown Chronology,” which cleared many obstacles and bridged gaps on my fact-finding path. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to my wife, collaborator, master editor, and partner Sue Woodley for, well, everything.
Introduction
MY PROFESSION IS COMMUNING with spirits. Since 1989, I have formally reviewed over 30,000 of the fermented and distilled consumable liquids commonly referred to as “spirits,” “distillates,” “water of life,” or, more scurrilously, “firewater,” “hooch,” “booze,” “sauce,” or “hard liquor.” In addition to my subscription-only newsletter F. Paul Pacult's Spirit Journal, these product evaluations, sometimes with accompanying feature stories, have appeared in scores of publications over the past three decades. These included the New York Times Sunday magazine, Wine Enthusiast, Playboy, Delta Sky in-flight magazine, Wine & Spirits, Men's Journal, Beverage Dynamics, Cheers, and many more. Wearing another of my career hats, for two decades I have consulted to numerous beverage companies, assisting them either in the creation of new spirit brands or helping them to revitalize old ones. In one such instance, I have turned master blender for an American whiskey portfolio, Jacob's Pardon. Then there is my spirits education hat, but on this I'll spare you details, saving them for the next time.
After plying my trade in this manner for over 30 years, I have come to many conclusions. Perhaps the most salient determination I have made is this: of all the spirits that illuminate the galaxy of distilled potables, whiskey is my hands-down favorite. As charming as it can be, whiskey is a perplexing spirits category, one that is on occasion disconcerting and, at its most extreme, impenetrable. Yet for all its manifold complexities, every whiskey is composed of only three easily obtained, foundational ingredients: grain, water, and yeast. After being 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