Buffalo Trace Distillery, producer of some of Kentucky’s finest whiskeys—including Buffalo Trace bourbon, Eagle Rare, and Sazerac Rye—has completed a $1.2 billion expansion at its historic facility along the Kentucky River in Frankfort. The final phase of the decade-long project was finished at the end of January. While other major Kentucky bourbon distilleries are reporting financial headwinds and slowing production or downsizing, Buffalo Trace continues to find market strength, said Master Distiller Harlan Wheatley.
Buffalo Trace Master Distiller Harlan Wheatley
“We’re watching the market closely, and our production and sales plans remain solid,” Wheatley said. “Sales are strong. None of our plans have slowed down as of yet.”
Regarding potential impacts from tariffs and trade disputes, Wheatley noted that while Buffalo Trace operates in global markets, its international expansion is still in the early stages. “We do anticipate challenges, but it’s still too early to tell,” he said.
The company’s global growth was underscored by the 2024 opening of Buffalo Trace Distillery London—an upscale tasting room and retail space in the heart of London’s bustling Covent Garden district.
Doubling Down on Growth
Since the multi-phase expansion project began in 2015, the distillery’s production capacity has increased by 150 percent, from 200,000 barrels annually to nearly 500,000 barrels. Over the same period, the company’s workforce has also doubled, from 400 to over 800 employees, making Buffalo Trace the largest private employer in Franklin County.
The project included upgrades to the visitors’ center, distribution center, bottling operation, boiler house, still house, dry house, mill house, and cistern room. The distillery added three new 75,000-gallon cistern tanks, 20 additional fermenters, three more steam boilers, four new cookers, and 19 additional barrel-aging warehouses. A new cooling system and wastewater treatment facility were also introduced.
A recently completed decade-long expansion at Buffalo Trace Distillery has doubled its production capacity and added 19 newly constructed barrel-aging warehouses (top left).
Records of bourbon distillation on the site date back to 1773, Wheatley said. The large red brick buildings on the property, constructed in 1850 before the Civil War, contribute to the distillery’s designation as a National Historic Landmark.
“Everything had to be complementary to the history of the distillery,” Wheatley said of the expansion.
While production doubled in capacity, only two new buildings were added: a still house and a mill house. “The new still house is basically a replica of our old still houses, with a few modern changes,” Wheatley said. The mill house was similarly reconstructed on the original site, using historically appropriate materials, colors, and scale.
Buffalo Trace offers a variety of tours, all concluding with tastings in the visitors’ center. The Hard Hat Tour offers an up-close look at the expansion and takes guests through the distillery’s operations, including the towering 93,000-gallon fermenter vats that rise three stories.
The building’s roof was raised to accommodate the new fermenters—an upgrade that blends seamlessly into the existing structure. Visitors can peer inside the bubbling fermenters through portal windows before moving on to the experimental distillery, a smaller-scale operation where new products are developed.
“We built that system in 2007,” Wheatley said. “Before that, if we wanted to experiment, we had to use our main system, which meant shutting down production and committing to a minimum batch of 35 barrels.”
Now, with a full-time experimental distiller, Buffalo Trace can test new recipes in batches as small as a single barrel. The distillery currently has around 5,000 experimental barrels in inventory.
One experiment that successfully scaled into full production is the Four Grain Bourbon—made from corn, rye, wheat, and malted barley—which was released under the Colonel E.H. Taylor label. In 2018, Whisky Bible author Jim Murray named Four Grain his World Whiskey of the Year.
Well-Earned Recognition
The distillery has won more than 500 awards for its wide range of whiskeys. In 2024 alone, William Larue Weller and Stagg Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey earned Best of Show at the Denver International Spirits Competition, while Traveller Whiskey, a partnership with musician Chris Stapleton, became the most awarded super-premium release of the year. The distillery has received more than 40 top titles from leading spirits publications, including Whisky Magazine’s 2024 Visitor Attraction of the Year.
On the subject of awards, Harlan Wheatley was the first to be named Master Distiller of the Year when Whisky Magazine established the award category in 2016. He is also a four-time James Beard Award nominee.
In 2019, Northern Kentucky University, where he studied chemical engineering and chemistry, honored him with its Outstanding Alumni Award.
After graduating from NKU in 1995, Wheatley began his career at Buffalo Trace, then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery. He trained for a decade under then-Master Distiller Gary Gaylord.
“I was born and raised in Kentucky, and I wanted to stay in Kentucky,” Wheatley said. “The door was open, and I walked through it. I trained under him for ten years. When he retired, I took over. I’m the sixth distiller here since the Civil War.”
The distillery was rebranded as Buffalo Trace Distillery in 1999.
“We brought on a new brand from scratch, and started with one bottle at a time and one case at a time, creating the brand of Buffalo Trace,” Wheatley said. “In 1999, we didn’t really think that we would ever get to the point where we would have to expand. It was a pretty full-size industrial site with a capacity so big that it wasn’t fully utilized.”
The distillery followed a methodical marketing strategy, beginning with a focus on Kentucky before expanding across all 50 states and, eventually, into global markets.
Today, with its massive expansion complete, Buffalo Trace is poised for continued growth both at home and around the world.