Ok, I’m coming out of the gate with my first post as a tour as I build my site. My wife knows how much I love Bourbon and in 2019 for my birthday she rented an AirBnB for a long weekend in Frankfort, KY so that we could visit the area and some distilleries. Pretty cool gift idea. Buffalo Trace wasn’t the first stop on the tour, but it will be the first review since I already had the above photo uploaded. I can confirm that I did indeed take the photo, but it is not without any filters. It was a overcast day and all of my photos are taken with an iphone, not some $2000 camera. You work with what you have got.
First, let me start by saying this review will be of the general FREE tour that Buffalo Trace provides. There are other categories for paid tours that you can find on the Buffalo Trace site and I have yet to experience one of those yet, but it’s on the list to try. With the above in mind lets dive into the experience.
We arrived onsite at Buffalo Trace on a HOT day in early may 2019. We didn’t book a formal tour so we just tried to slide into one of the free ones. Luckily we made the cut and were able to join one of the last tours of the day. Others who were not that far behind us in line were not so fortunate.
Great, we got our free rubber bracelet and told the time and place where our tour would start. There were multiple starting locations as they have many tours going at once based on the massive volume the distillery sees. Only problem was we had 2 hours until our tour started. We decided to just pass the time at the gift shop area because we wanted to look around anyway. We were able to purchase items, look around the gift shop, load our items in our car, see the 7,000,000th barrel on display but aside from the tour we saw what we could without entering into spaces or buildings that we probably shouldn’t go into. We burned 45 minutes and had an hour and fifteen minutes to kill. Since it was so hot outside we made our way back into the gift shop. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of space in there and there are probably a total of 10 chairs for the 100 people that are also waiting for a tour with you. Long story short, I would recommend getting to the distillary early, get a tour for later in the day, look around if you wish, leave and come back just prior to your allotted time. OR, just sign up for one of the themed paid tours, but you will need to do that months in advance.
So now onto the tour itself. Out of all the tours I attended this one had some of the best moments and also some of the worst. I’ll explain. Our tour started by walking us into a room and watching a 15 minute video. I’m sure this is done due to the massive volume they have, but you can watch videos on your computer at home. It was educational and it was nice to have a Q&A session following the video, but the video I can do without.
From the video room we walked (kind of) past warehouse H (Home to Blanton’s bottles) and into one of their first Warehouses (which I can’t remember now for the life of me). This was one of my favorite parts. You basically just walk into the rickhouse maybe 50-100 feet and look around while you guide give you information, but it was one of my favorite moments due to the SMELL. Oh yes, the smell of a rickhouse is so hard to describe, but it’s my favorite. You get the old soaking oak, angels share, old building, etc and I wish I could bottle up that smell. I have a few pictures from that portion of the tour below.
Our tour finished at the bottling section which was cool, because it specific to Blanton’s bottling. They explained the Blanton’s process and the room was pretty historic. You got to see the stacks of unique (different than the US version) Blanton’s bottles that were planned to be shipped internationally, which breaks my heart given it’s so hard to find in the states, but business is business.
The tour guides all seemed knowledgeable and great. After the guided tour they bring you back to the giftshop to the upper floor where you get a free tasting. We got to try their Vodka, White Dog, Bourbon Cream, Buffalo Trace, and lastly Eagle Rare.
I’ll end by saying this tour was FREE! If I had a choice I’d pay the money to get a themed tour from their site, but I didn’t have enough forethought to book that in advance. Given that I didn’t book a themed tour in time I still recommend the tour. It’s free (did I mention that), but even the free tour has what many paid tours don’t. That is the ability to walk into a rickhouse and experience the smell is SO worth it. Many distilleries on Whiskey Row (Louisville) have distilleries on site, but rick houses offsite so you don’t get to experience that part of the tour.
I appreciate that Buffalo Trace has tours designed for those who planned early and those who just decided to pop in. It’s highly recommended that you visit Buffalo Trace. It’s massive and I’m sure many of you know, they produce some of the most sought after bourbons on the planet.
https://www.buffalotracedistillery.com/
113 Great Buffalo Trace Frankfort, KY 40601