New Buffalo Trace tour lets you sample KY bourbon straight from barrels
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Buffalo Trace launches Sazerac Barrel Select tour in Nov for SBS club members.
- Tour guests sample bourbon from barrels and receive a take-home Buffalo Trace bottle.
- Program open to 100,000+ members; tours cost $35 and barrel picks remain limited.
A new tour at Buffalo Trace will let you get a taste of what it’s like to select your own bourbon barrel.
The Sazerac Barrel Select program is launching the new tour in November for SBS club members. It’s free to join at SazeracBarrelSelect.com, and once you have accumulated enough points you can book a chance to tour and taste directly from the barrels.
The idea is to give more members of the Barrel Select program something to participate in, said Diego Bianchi, vice president of global hubs for Sazerac.
“We really want to bring this to life for a larger consumer base than we’re able to host for dedicated barrel selections,” Bianchi said. “We want this to be special, and when you come out here you learn a little bit about what makes us unique and special and you get a bottle that you had a chance to touch and taste yourself.”
The program can let only about 100 people (drawn randomly four times per year) come to Sazerac’s distilleries and pick out a barrel to bottle for their own.
“Obviously a barrel’s a big investment, and not everyone is quite ready for it,” said Grace Lakeman, retail marketing associate for Sazerac Barrel Select. “Now you can get a barrel if you want to or get behind-the-scenes information and tours like this.”
Buying a whole barrel of bourbon, which could equate to a few hundred bottles, may cost thousands of dollars, but this new tour is only $35 per person, and that includes your take-home bottle of Buffalo Trace.
Sampling directly from the barrel
The new tour will let you enjoy much of that experience: You’ll slip through a “speakeasy” door hidden behind a bookcase to enter a cool and slightly damp warehouse built in 1907 to sample Buffalo Trace bourbon directly from the barrel in a disused elevator shaft. A guide will unlock the copper barrel “thief” and draw out enough for everyone in the tour to sample.
You’ll get all the details about when the liquid in the barrel was distilled and filled, where it has been sitting and for how long. And you’ll taste it in its purest form, at cask strength, which is much higher than the 90-proof Buffalo Trace bourbon in the bottle. (On a recent media preview, the sample we tasted was 131.7 proof, filled on March 10, 2017, and was robust, oaky and surprisingly smooth even at 11 a.m.)
Then you’ll visit two more warehouses and get to do it all over again. (My tour compared to one barrel was in Warehouse I, built in 1935, and the barrel was filled Oct. 27, 2017 and was 132.2 proof, much spicier with lots of pine tar tannins to my palate.)
Tours will also sample a third barrel in Warehouse P, built in 1941, giving you a chance to compare three barrels of similar age so you can see how much difference the warehouse can make.
The distillery now known as Buffalo Trace originated the idea of single-barrel bottlings: In the 1940s, Albert Blanton used to have employees roll “honey” or extra-special barrels from his favorite warehouse, the metal-clad warehouse H, up the hill to his house where he and friends could enjoy them.
In 1984, then-master distiller Elmer T. Lee decided to bottle individual barrels under the Blanton’s label and pioneered an entire new premium segment of the whiskey industry.
Back in a special lounge in Warehouse D, you’ll get a chance to taste your bourbons again, this time at 90 proof, from “sister barrels” that have the same age and warehouse location as the ones you sampled at cask strength. And then you’ll pick which one you like better and get to take home a bottle right away.
That’s much quicker than a typical barrel selection, which can take six months to be bottled and shipped.
The Sazerac Barrel Select program is hugely popular, and there are more than 100,000 members. But most barrels are selected by clients like restaurants, bars, bourbon clubs or significant buyers like stores that can rate an allocation.
The retail barrel selections are booked up to six months in advance, done three times a day in Warehouse H and Warehouse D, both recently remodeled after the distillery cleaned up from the historic flooding in the spring.
