First Taste: Eagle Rare 25 Year, the $10,000 Ultra-Aged Expression from Buffalo Trace

Warehouse P contains an enormous non-descript box within the rickhouse that’s an intricately controlled environment for ultra-aging whiskey. And, despite the 90-degree October heat blanketing Buffalo Trace’s Frankfort, Kentucky distillery, a rack of heavy-down winter parkas are available near a sneaky door—a hidden shelf you push through, feeling a bit like James Bond—to enter this magical experimental space. You’ll need that parka; as the door swings, a blast of arctic air greets us.

The room seems endless, the ricks appear to shrink to a vanishing point down the hallway. Half-full of barrels—many marked with curious names, including “Harlen’s mini still barrel,” a pile of Weller distillate, and even some Last Drop “experimental” barrels—there are now even fewer. Master Distiller Harlen Wheatley has removed six from this very room to create an Eagle Rare 25 Year, the oldest bourbon Buffalo Trace has ever produced for the Eagle Rare line.

Introducing Eagle Rare 25 Year Bourbon

Launching today, Eagle Rare 25 is but the tip of the spear in ultra-aged releases resulting from Buffalo Trace’s $20-million investment into the future of aging. Warehouse X has been in operation since 2017; it’s a 4,000-square-foot innovation rickhouse, nestled on the sprawling Buffalo Trace distillery grounds, aimed at determining the best way to manipulate the environment to improve aging.

After a 2006 tornado demolished part of a warehouse, the barrels that weathered the storm ultimately were so tasty, they were launched as E.H. Taylor Jr. 's Warehouse C Tornado Surviving, and Wheatley and crew sought to discover why, exactly, they were so good. Now, 600 barrels of Buffalo Trace occupy five distinct chambers within Warehouse X, each precisely subjected to an environmental variable—temperature, humidity, air flow, and sunlight, namely—to test the resulting tasting.

Initial findings surrounding temperature swings were so promising that a larger space, able to have precision environmental control, was created within Warehouse P, which launched in 2018. And in here, barrels of Buffalo Trace’s Mashbill #1—Eagle Rare’s base—containing undisclosed amounts of corn, rye (believed to be under 10 percent, making it a “barely-legal” rye blend) and barley were parked. Prior to rolling into Warehouse P, these honey barrels, initially laid down in 1988, were plucked from Wheatley’s special locations within special rickhouses.

Inside Warehouse P, Buffalo Trace’s Home for the Future of Ultra-Aging

Spending over five years within Warehouse P’s VIP chamber, these barrels saw wild temperature fluctuations, though Buffalo Trace won’t disclose what precise temperatures were. (From our walkthrough, we can share that we were quite frigid after five minutes.) The result was the ability to lengthen the amount of aging without imbuing the bourbon with too many tannins or otherwise unfavorable flavors during a longer maturation process.

This revolutionary environment is, so far, able to mitigate the previous stymying of extremely-aged whiskey. Walking us through Warehouse P, Wheatley mentions how the little resulting liquid in a barrel, after the angel’s share evaporates, typically becomes too intense, at a certain age, with too much oak, or too dry, or astringent. Yet that wasn’t the case here, in this room. To prove his point, Wheatley’s team distributes samples of Eagle Rare 25, proofed at 101, and those first sips were divine.

What Does Eagle Rare 25 Taste Like?

In a word, delicious. On the nose, you’ll get little pops of spearmint, a faint hint of orange citrus, oak, though not in an overpowering way, and some dark red fruits, like stewed cherries.

On the palate, notes of baked cherry pie zips to the front first, followed by burgeoning dark chocolate notes. It quickly and loudly evolves into baking spices—that low-rye from the mashbill showing up in the middle of the party, getting shouty for a moment, then fading away—and the lingering finish gives a bit of plum followed by a hit of something Wheatley describes as “rickhouse dust,” and it is an apt description.

Per Wheatley, the point here is balance of all these flavors, with the oak from the barrel not overshadowing. Indeed, it doesn’t; the whiskey is softer and sweeter (you’ll get the familiar notes of caramel, butterscotch, and vanilla), and it’s thinner than its younger sibling, Double Eagle Very Rare 20 Year.

How Does Eagle Rare 25 Taste Compared to Double Eagle Very Rare 20 Year?

We had a dram of that now-second-oldest Eagle Rare expression just before tasting the 25 Year. The Double Eagle Very Rare 20 Year, also proofed at 101, gives off more barrel on the nose than the 25 Year. There’s more orange zest on the nose, a little more mint, too.

Double Eagle Very Rare 20 Year gives a wild amount of deep red fruits at first sip, and moves into dark chocolate, or baking chocolate, before the rye comes in with an explosion of pepper, and then trailing off into a lingering pecan pie finish. The 20 Year is a little louder than the 25, but that’s not a bad thing. It still all comes together within the dram.

How Much Does Eagle Rare 25 Cost and How Many Bottles Will Be Available?

The packaging is quite stunning—a hand-blown crystal decanter, featuring an eagle with outstretched wings inside the bottle—and it comes with a separate travel stopper to keep the bottle secure, in addition to a more ornate stopper to use when pouring. Combine this with the fact that a scant 200 of these beautiful bottles will be filled, and you arrive at a suggested retail price of $10,000 per 750ml bottle.

That sticker price is up significantly from Double Eagle Very Rare 20 Year’s suggested retail price of $2,000, with an annual release of between 800 and 1,200 bottles, depending on that year’s yield.

Will You Actually Be Able to Ever Try Eagle Rare 25 Year?

Maybe. At least, Buffalo Trace hopes so. Ask Wheatley if he thinks it should be collected, displayed as art, or consumed, and he says, “it would be a shame to let it sit in the bottle,” while quipping you need to choose your drinking moments with Eagle Rare 25 Year wisely: “It’s not a Friday night movie drink; you’ll need a very special celebration for this.”

Andrew Duncan, global brand director for Buffalo Trace Distillery, tells us that, with the three-tier-system, the distillery has little control over where the bottles go, but “we are taking steps to get it to the places that will open and pour it.”

What steps, specifically? “Within what we can do, we can recommend accounts to our distributor, accounts we believe will pour it. Can I enforce that bottles actually go there? No, we’d get a nasty letter. But we’re trying to ensure this reaches Eagle Rare fans and drinkers.”