What Exactly Is BuffTurkey Bourbon? And Why Is Everyone Going Wild Over It?

BuffTurkey. Russalo Trace. Wild Buffalo. The hottest whiskey on the market—Wild Turkey bourbon distilled by Buffalo Trace—has several portmanteau monikers, and even more alleged origin stories. The leading lore? A professional sports franchise owner from the South won a national championship and commissioned these barrels before forgetting about them. Others say Campari Group faced production woes during expansion of a then recently purchased Wild Turkey and tapped Buffalo Trace to help, but didn’t love the finished product.

Also shrouded in mystery is the production run’s final volumes. Industry scuttlebutt varies widely, from a scant 600 barrels to an eye-watering 10,000 barrels. The latter seems improbable, as that would represent three to four straight weeks of non-stop production by Buffalo Trace. A thousand barrels, insiders tell me, is most likely; that would require only two production days.

How BuffTurkey Was Made and Sold

While we can’t officially confirm the genesis or the yield—both Buffalo Trace and Wild Turkey declined requests to comment for this story—several BuffTurkey production facts are indisputable.

In March 2009, Buffalo Trace distilled a mashbill of 75% corn, 13% rye, and 12% barley—the quintessential Wild Turkey mashbill—and entered that liquid into No.-4 char International Stave Company barrels. (While that mashbill is Wild Turkey, the yeast and grains were both Buffalo Trace.) Those barrels matured for at least 14 years at Wild Turkey, at which point the team at Wild Turkey decided the taste—decidedly good and lacking faults—was not on profile for its products.

The fruits of this endeavor were then sold to brokers, and mostof it was snapped up by non-distilling producers (NDPs) and brought to market under various labels and barrel clubs. Nearly two dozen separate labels containing BuffTurkey bourbon—ranging from 14 to 16 years—have hit the market, typically priced between $250 and $399.

People are rabid for this liquid; bottlings are setting astronomical records on the secondary market, with some moving for a staggering $2,500 per bottle.

What Bottles Contain BuffTurkey Bourbon?

“This is the industry’s worst-kept secret,” one distillery executive who had a hand in sales of BuffTurkey tells me anonymously, due to stiff non-disclosure agreements. “All it took was one barrel head getting out there, then it hit Reddit, then people went nuts. Now, there’s an assumption that every NDP bottle with a 75/13/12 mashbill is BuffTurkey. Not true. There’s 15 year Wild Turkey and 15 year Jim Beam on the brokerage market right now, too. Consumers need to understand what they’re actually buying.”

What’s confirmed BuffTurkey? By no means is this a comprehensive list, but the following labels and/or brands utilize BuffTurkey bourbon: Bluegrass Elkwood Reserve 15 year old, S.N. Pike’s Magnolia, New Era Whiskey and Spirits, The Whiskey Blendery’s 16 year old Greased Lightning, River Roots, Seelbach’s, Dark Arts Whiskey House, Augusta’s Buckner’s 15 year old, Nashville Barrel Company, and OKI 16 year old.

What Does BuffTurkey Taste Like?

Mostly delicious. Researching this story, I tried more than 30 examples of BuffTurkey blends and single barrels, at proofs that range from 96 to hazmat levels of 140 and above. It’s off-profile for Wild Turkey and Buffalo Trace products, so don’t expect to taste something close to Russell’s Reserve 15. (Or George T. Stagg, Buffalo Trace’s limited offering that’s a minimum of 15 years). But you’ll be thrilled; it’s exceptional 15 year old Kentucky bourbon.

“It has a signature profile. To me, that’s a dusty Wild Turkey,” says Macaulay Minton, president and chief alchemist of Dark Arts Whiskey House. “The casks vary, some are clearly better than others. Most have a cherry cola note, much of it is fairly sweet; nothing is too drying,” says Minton, who purchased dozens of BuffTurkey barrels. “A lot of it is higher proof, which alters the flavor profile of what I was expecting.”

Yet much of the higher proof BuffTurkey drinks far softer and is very approachable. One of Minton’s Dark Arts 15 year old single barrels I tried was 140.2 proof—though it drinks closer to 110—and has a deep macerated berry nose, with an exceptionally fun sour cherry candy finish. S.N. Pike’s Magnolia 16 year old Single Barrel is a velvety caramel bomb that explodes with cherrywood notes toward the end, but you’d never guess it’s 141 proof. Seelbach’s Pro 2025, a 15 year single barrel offering clocking in at 126.6 proof, drinks below 100 proof, with a sugared cherry nose, super luscious and creamy on the palate, and zero burn on the finish, which is dark chocolate-covered cherries.

One Dark Arts 15 year old single barrel, dubbed “Omnia Vanitas”, selected by luxury sample bottle company Liquid Ministry, is exquisite. The front of your tongue tingles with a huge pop of cherry jam that moves into honey drizzled cornbread, the best combination of sweet meeting savory. Savoring the extensive jammy finish, I glance at the proof: 141.4. I was certain this was around 100. Liquid Ministry’s bottle will make you rethink everything you believe about hazmat whiskey.

Sample after sample, brand after brand, largely, the liquid delivers. All are pretty wet and chewy, with a good heft to the liquid. All sip far below their proof points. There are misses, but that’s true of any decent-sized production run. It’s no surprise, then, that across bourbonite social groups and barrel clubs, whispers turned to shouts and the BuffTurkey hype train barreled away from the station.

The Swelling Cult of BuffTurkey

Signs of BuffTurkey fervor abound. Dedicated forums have sprung up, secondary market members post about the bourbon’s prevailing iconography (the buffalo followed by the turkey icon) in digital discourse. Ardent debates about whether new liquid, for example, Praedictum Whiskey, is BuffTurkey have dozens of sparring comments (alas, Praedictum is not BuffTurkey). Brands and bottles receive truncated, cutesy aliases—River Roots becomes RiRo—and then are dissected and ranked. Brands that released supremely short barrels, 30 bottles or fewer, have followers tracking the whereabouts of each bottle, noting when one sells, which are open, and who owns the remaining inventory.

One NDP launched exclusively on the back of BuffTurkey: New Era Whiskey and Spirits (NEWS), in Lexington, Kentucky. Matt Hobbs and his business partner Zane Brammell were separately running successful barrel picking groups when they decided to team up and launch New Era last fall. When figuring out initial offerings, “we tasted 60 barrels [of BuffTurkey]. 90% were good; 20% were great,” says Hobbs. “We knew this was it.”

The duo secured a microloan from friends and family, enough to secure 10 barrels and set to work selling those. “It was certainly a slow takeoff,” Hobbs recalls. “People thought it was gimmicky. But then they started landing, the FOMO hit, and suddenly every [barrel picking] group that bought one from us sold out immediately.”

After going back to the broker twice for more inventory, New Era sold 16 barrels of BuffTurkey within three months. “Ever since, it’s been people constantly reaching out to us,” Hobbs says. (Before you follow suit and email, New Era’s BuffTurkey is long gone, though the NDP now has other sourced whiskey.)

Every pedestal invites its stones. “Absolute dumbest thing in this hobby currently,” fumes one forum commenter. “Timeline filled with nothing but [BuffTurkey] garbage.” Condemnations center around retail prices and secondary market valuations, perception of the liquid’s quality, and (uncorroborated) beliefs that brands are shilling within resale groups to inflate valuations.

Regarding all that ire, the distillery executive I spoke to laughs. “Whether it’s contract distilled or not, I’ve never seen more people disputing wanting 15 year old Buffalo Trace,” he says. “These Internet snobs claiming it’s not that special are the same people who still chase allocated Buffalo Trace products.”

Standing Apart From the Competition

In a space increasingly crowded with homogeneous expensive bourbon, bottle packaging and design is vital to standing out. “High-quality releases become even more attractive when the presentation is there,” says Mel Joye, co-founder of Liquid Ministry. “Our Dark Arts 15 year old single barrel deserved an elevated level of customization, and the theme ‘All is Vanity,’ [‘Omnia Vanitas’ in Latin] was used to illustrate that concept.”

Joye is a fan of Dark Arts’ branding aesthetic and sought only to complement it. “We designed custom label overlays to match the killer matte black and copper foil labeling,” Joye says, noting those were laser cut to fit atop the existing label. A bespoke canvas neck ring with metal bindery screws was added, to display the pick’s Omnia Vanitas name.

“Everybody loves a trinket,” says Joye, so a small mirror on a metal keychain to represent the theme of vanity was fabricated. “The key chains were made from a series of parts we found in local craft stores, each customized on our laser engraver. The inner mirror is etched on the back side and then painted black to show the Dark Arts logo through the glass.”

Lastly, those copper wax drips around the front of the bottle? “A glue gun, wax, and a beer can to get the curvature just right,” Joye grins. Impeccable in form and finish, Omnia Vanitas embodies the pinnacle of bottle design.

What’s BuffTurkey Worth?

Much of the online chatter surrounds the pricing and valuations of BuffTurkey bottles. The retail price, above $250, is driven by steep barrel pricing from brokers and distributors. Then there’s often an upcharge for perceived desirability, resulting in pricing that’s all over the map. Expect pricing to keep rising: “These barrels are gone. The method is gone. These are once in a lifetime bottles,” says Minton.

“The market is heading in a direction where people are not buying a lot, but they’re buying ‘better,’” says Rob Bralow, owner of Blue Streak Wine in New York City. Bralow partnered with Shawn Kim, owner of 120 West 58th Street Wine and Liquor in NYC, to split a single barrel of Seelbach’s 16 year old BuffTurkey. “I was initially against it, since it’s so expensive,” says Bralow, “but Kim made the first taste and it’s a banging whiskey.”

“Our distributor had five options to taste from, and we got the only barrel in New York City,” says Kim, noting the rest sold in upstate New York. “That regional exclusivity helps make it more attractive, and helps us justify the price,” Kim says, sharing that a single barrel costs more than $20,000. The duo’s shared barrel is short, about 100 bottles in total. “That’s comforting, since we need to sell this quickly to make the cash make sense,” says Bralow. “It’s hard moving 250 bottles at $350 apiece,” adds Kim.

The head-scratching moment, for most, is when the bottles hit the secondary market. Take New Era’s famed The Heart bottle, dubbed as such after Hobbs’ fiancée drew chalk hearts on the barrel during the selection process so it wouldn’t get lost. “It was 145.2 proof and a very short barrel, only 23 bottles,” says Hobbs, adding that he still had to pay the full barrel price. “It retailed at $499.99, and we lost money on every bottle.”

The Heart bottle is now moving for more than $3,500 on secondary forums, getting traded for the likes of Pappy Van Winkle 23 and Michter’s 20 year olds. Liquid Ministry’s Dark Arts Omnia Vanitas bottle is flipping for $2,000. River Roots bottles are moving above $1,350. And prices for each continue to climb. It’s hard to say where the secondary ceiling is, given a limited supply that will only dwindle over time.

The Future of BuffTurkey

While the bulk of the BuffTurkey made has been bottled and sold—“I think 70% has already hit the market,” says my distillery executive source—I’m aware of several NDPs holding onto barrels for later releases. Higher corn and malt percentages in the mashbill mean BuffTurkey can mature longer without turning astringent.

“Another 15% will be released when it’s 18 or 19 years, and the remaining 15% will be aged 20-plus years,” predicts the distillery executive. “In warehouses with low humidity, on a lower rickhouse shelf, [this distillate] could go for 24 or 25 years and still yield 60 to 70 bottles. Someone will do that.” Imagine those retail and secondary prices?

Want to get your hands on a bottle now? It’s harder but not impossible, particularly if you’ve got deep pockets. “Given the different quality floating around, don’t just buy at first sight,” says Minton, whose Dark Arts Lexington tasting room opens this month. With more than 2,000 bottles of BuffTurkey, from 20 barrels, his space represents a solid starting point for trying the liquid before buying blindly.