Buffalo Trace Distillery goes for significant expansion

Buffalo Trace Distillery continues to make great strides with its 1.2 billion USD expansion, including more barrel warehouses, construction of an additional still, additional fermenters, expanding the dry house operations and much more over the past year.

While the distillery continues with its massive expansion, unfortunately it will still be a few years before bourbon supply catches up with demand. Buffalo Trace recognises this is not the news its fans want to hear for the next few years but making great whiskey does take time and the distillery is not prepared to cut quality corners to increase short-term supply. In the meantime, it is committed to supplying every drop of high-quality whiskey at fair prices until it can supply more.

The addition of a second still house will double the production capacity for the distillery, with a duplicate still standing 40 feet tall and having the capacity of 60,000 gallons.

Eight additional fermenters were added and went online in January 2021, joining the four new fermenters added in December of 2019 and bringing Buffalo Trace’s total fermenter count to 24. The new fermenters are 93,000 gallons each, slightly larger than the twelve older fermenters Buffalo Trace still uses, which have been in place since 1933.

One of the more interesting construction projects started in the distillery in the past year involves repurposing the oldest aging barrel warehouse on property, Warehouse B, to a new dry house.

A new cooling system is also underway, which includes mash coolers, chillers and cooling towers, all necessary to cool the mash down after cooking so it can be transferred to fermenters as needed.

The distillery has broken ground with a $40.0 million wastewater treatment facility, allowing it to be self-sufficient in its treatment of wastewater. New barrel aging warehouses HH, II, and JJ have also been added in the past year and LL and MM are under construction now. Warehouses KK and NN are in the planning stages.

Upcoming infrastructure projects for this 246-year-old distillery in the near future include a new mill house. The mill house will increase the grain grinding capacity to match new distillation capacity by replacing the current hammer mills.