Quest for the Perfect Bourbon: Voices of Buffalo Trace Distillery (review)

As recently as 250 years ago, buffalo crossed the Kentucky River. Kentucky was America’s frontier in the 1770s, and in the midst of the pre-Revolution push westward, white settlers founded Lees Town (today Frankfort) on the edge of the important waterway in 1775. It was a natural crossing point already known to buffalo and native tribes, and it was the most passable crossing of a river still undeveloped and unsuitable for navigation beyond a canoe or flatboat. Settlers soon realized its commercial possibilities. The confluence of rich land for the production of corn, a plentiful water source, and means to transport goods to other markets lent itself to the creation of what we, today, call bourbon. Two-hundred and thirty seven years later, Kentucky produces more than ninety-five percent of the world’s supply. Production has doubled since 1999—from 455,078 barrels to 937,865 barrels in 2007. Bourbon is big business. Distillers helped create 10,000 jobs with an annual payroll of $442 million, and generated $125 million a year in taxes. About 4.7 million barrels were aging in Kentucky at last count.

Joanna Hay’s documentary Quest for the Perfect Bourbon: Voices of Buffalo Trace Distillery takes us behind the business of the bottle and traces the heritage of this distinctly Kentucky libation. The film explores the origins, lineage, and people of this spot on the Kentucky River where bourbon was born. Hay primarily relies on interviews from The Buffalo Trace Oral History Project—a collection of oral histories of current and retired employees of the Buffalo Trace Distillery and its affiliated brands, from CEOs to warehouse supervisors—to tell the story, supplemented by historians and archival images. The project was developed by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University Kentucky Libraries, intended to preserve the story of Frankfort’s Buffalo Trace Distillery. Nunn Center Director Doug Boyd served as the film’s executive producer. Extended interviews and detailed information about the project can be found online at http://www.nunncenter.org/buffalotrace/.

The historians in Hay’s documentary, along with the Buffalo Trace Distillery staff, acclimate us to this tidy corner of the Kentucky River. We learn that it was Commodore Richard Taylor, arriving in the area after the French and Indian War, who built a one-story house called Riverside in 1792 and established the first bourbon production. His house still stands on the Buffalo Trace campus. Whiskey was made through the Civil War, but it was after the war that markets significantly expanded. The Gilded Age ushered in the formation of standards for purity of whiskey, developed under the leadership of E.H. Taylor, Jr. Taylor arrived in Frankfort in 1870. He transformed the farm distillery into a modern engine of production. He purchased the site the Commodore had built nearly 100 years earlier and established seven different distilleries.

Taylor strove for purity of product. He worked to eliminate the adulteration of whiskey proliferating at that time, including lethal recipes that included sulfuric acid. He ushered in laws that guarded the “precious corn juice,” now made and bottled under government supervision. Hay uncovers newspaper headlines of the day that illustrate that already in the nineteenth-century bourbon was big news and big business.

Taylor’s belief in the superiority of product was only outdone by his determination that fine whiskey deserved a fine environment. He constructed a grand distillery built of elegant materials. The grandeur of the site and quality of operations attracted workers throughout the twentieth century. Transitioning from Ken Burns-ian documentarianism to oral history-centric storytelling, Hay introduces us to secretaries, warehouse supervisors, master distillers, and family members that inhabited the site. They speak of pristine traditions and regal owners. CEO Albert Blanton oversaw operations during the first half of the twentieth century; his niece...