The bourbon everyone chases turns out to be the fairly priced one in its own lineup. The dearer bottles wearing the same label are where the money goes.
Buffalo Trace has a cult around it, the kind that makes a plain-label bourbon hard to find and easy to mark up. So the useful question on this shelf is not whether the name is good. It is which of the four bottles carrying it is actually priced in step with the whiskies it tastes like. Set each against its crowd, the ten drams the model rates nearest it on flavour, and the answer is the cheapest and least fussy of them. The brand's middle price this week is $84, but that figure hides a wide spread between the everyday pour and the collector pieces.
Start with the one most people mean when they say Buffalo Trace: the standard 700mL. At $58 against a crowd sitting near $56, it is priced within a couple of dollars of its flavour-neighbours, which is about as honest as a sought-after bourbon gets. It drinks the way the reviews read, too: caramel and honey up front, a cooling thread of mint, light grain and a little anise on the back. This is the bottle the fuss is about, and on these numbers the fuss has not been allowed to inflate the tag. For a Kentucky bourbon with this much goodwill behind it, paying the going rate for the style is the whole story.
Two American whiskeys the engine's profile model keeps shelving together: Jack Daniel's Old No.7 and Buffalo Trace. On make-up it reads them as close kin, a cosine of 0.94. Both sit at or near their own floor this week — the Jack a litre at $73, the Buffalo Trace a 700 at $56.
Jack Daniel's Old No.7 at $55 and Buffalo Trace at $58 are both sitting at the bottom of their own recent range this week. Two everyday American whiskeys, a few dollars apart, quietly at their floor at the same time.
Four Buffalo Traces share the shelf this week. Only the plainest of them still earns the bargain the label is famous for; the other three are riding on it.
Buffalo Trace is a distillery that built its name on being good and cheap. The bottles beside the standard one this week are still good. They have stopped being cheap.
Most ranges bury their honest bottle somewhere in the middle. Buffalo Trace put its right at the entry, at the price the model says it is worth.
| bottle | region | latest ticket | read | window price | CE 360° mean | premium | shelf rank | per std drink | drink rank | content |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buffalo Trace Bourbon 1L | Kentucky | $89.99 | observed | $59.50 | $58.92 | 1.0% | #5 of 44 | $2.69 | #10 of 39 | 0 |
| Buffalo Trace Bourbon 700mL | Kentucky | $57.85 | observed | $56.95 | $56.46 | 0.9% | #3 of 44 | $2.62 | #8 of 39 | 2 |
| Buffalo Trace Single Barrel | Kentucky | $94.99 | observed | $88.66 | $85.20 | 3.9% | #21 of 44 | $3.00 | #18 of 39 | 0 |
| Traveller Whiskey | Kentucky | $81.99 | observed | $81.99 | $77.86 | 5.0% | #23 of 44 | $2.78 | #13 of 39 | 0 |