Buffalo Trace Distillery

Two centuries on the buffalo’s path.

The distillery’s history begins in 1775, when Leestown was established on a bend of the Kentucky River at Frankfort — a crossing the buffalo had already chosen. Its name comes from those ancient pathways, the traces carved through the wilderness by migrating herds. Bourbon has been made on the same ground for more than two hundred years, which makes it, by its own account, the oldest continually operating distillery in America.

The names on its rarest bottles are the men who built it. Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr. invested a small fortune — some seventy thousand dollars — in a new distillery on the site in 1870. George T. Stagg, who had risen from whiskey salesman to lead the business, was honoured when the distillery was re-christened in his name in 1904. Albert B. Blanton raised its warehouses through the 1930s. The craft carried on through wars, floods, fires, tornadoes and even Prohibition.

In 2013 the distillery was designated a National Historic Landmark, a rare distinction for a working producer. What it releases under its own name is not a range but a series of annual gatherings — whiskeys drawn from barrels it sets aside as its oldest and most exceptional, bottled at or near barrel proof, without chill filtration, and assembled once each year in quantities that vanish on announcement.