Chasing The Unicorn

Your Quest For the Perfect Pour

← All Built For answers

Built For

Why Is Buffalo Trace Always Sold Out?

Buffalo Trace has an empty shelf problem, and nobody ran out of bourbon.

They're making more of it than they ever have, the warehouses are the fullest in their history, and your store still can't get it. Everybody calls that a shortage. It isn't. It's a decision — made by a company that doesn't work for the distillery, has never met you, and will never set foot in your store.

Why is Buffalo Trace so hard to find. Why is my store always out. Is Buffalo Trace discontinued. People have been typing those for a decade — I found a drinker in Kentucky, actual bourbon country, who couldn't get Weller 12 for over a year, and that complaint is from 2014.

Buffalo Trace is the name on the search, so it's the one we'll work through. 9 million barrels filled, a $1.2 billion expansion, production up 150% — and it changed nothing about your shelf. Understanding why is the whole episode, and it will tell you more about every other empty spot in that aisle than it will about bourbon.

So the shortage is old news. What's new is that I can now show you the other half of the answer, the half nobody talks about, because it played out in public over the last twelve months in a bankruptcy court in Texas.

The short answer

Start with the part everybody knows, because it's real and Buffalo Trace says it themselves. Their own vice president: we are still catching up to consumer demand, and though our bourbons can be hard to find at times, more is coming. That's the company, on the record.

And they meant it. The expansion finished in January of 2025 — a decade of work. 19 new aging warehouses. 20 fermentation tanks. Production capacity up 150%. They hit their 7 millionth barrel in 2018, 8 million by the end of 2022, and 9 million in 2025 — that last million took under 3 years.

But here's the thing about barrels. A barrel filled the day that expansion finished is not bourbon you can buy. Buffalo Trace is aged years before it's bottled, so everything they built is a promise about the 2030s. The whiskey on your shelf today was distilled back when the expansion was still scaffolding. That's the aging lag, and it's the part most explanations stop at.

The whole thing — the law, the examples, the sources

Now the part they don't. Because while all that was happening, the pipe your bottle travels through was being dismantled — state by state — and almost nobody outside the industry noticed.

In America, a distillery cannot sell you a bottle. It's not that they choose not to; it's illegal. The three-tier system came out of the 21st Amendment and a 1935 federal act, written after Prohibition to stop producers from owning the stores that sold their liquor. Producer sells to distributor. Distributor sells to retailer. Retailer sells to you. Nobody is allowed to own more than one tier. Every bottle in this country walks that path, and there are over 200 different state frameworks governing how.

So the middle tier decides your shelf. Which brings us to Republic National Distributing Company.

RNDC traced back to 1898 and grew into the second-largest liquor distributor in America — about 40 states, roughly $12 billion a year, 390,000 cases delivered every single day. On July 26th of this year, they filed Chapter 11 in Texas, with liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion, and told the court they were exploring asset sales and an orderly wind down.

And it didn't happen all at once. Watch the pipe close. California first — final deliveries September of 2025, 1,756 jobs gone. Then this year: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington D.C. all transferred to another distributor in May. Oregon and Washington sold at the end of June. Nebraska, the Dakotas in July. Around 18 states still sitting in the bankruptcy, waiting to be sold or liquidated.

Now here's the part that ties it to your glass. When RNDC told the court why this happened, one of the reasons was suppliers walking away — over $3 billion of annual revenue gone — and the filing names them. Sazerac. Which is Buffalo Trace. Pappy Van Winkle. Blanton's.

So during the exact years your shelf looked emptiest, Buffalo Trace's route to your store was changing hands across dozens of states. In California it left RNDC in early 2023 — two full years before RNDC itself exited. Which means the bottle changed middlemen twice in three years before it ever got near you.

And that's why the answer to "why can't I find it" depends on which side of a state line you're standing on.

In one Connosr thread, three drinkers answered the same question three different ways. The man in Kentucky: they haven't had Weller 12 on the shelves in over a year, it's all very spotty. Another: Eagle Rare was so sparse I presumed it was on allocation, Blanton's has all but vanished. And then a third, in Virginia: no, I haven't noticed less, my state seems pretty well stocked.

Same country. Same week. Same whiskey. Three completely different shelves. That's not demand — demand doesn't stop at a state line. That's plumbing.

Because here's what most people don't know: in 18 jurisdictions, the government is the distributor. Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, 16 others — about a quarter of the country's population. In those states an agency decides which stores get which bottles, and 13 of them run the retail stores too. Everywhere else it's private distributors under license. And in about half the country, franchise laws mean a brand can't even fire a distributor that's failing it without proving cause to the state. One executive described it as a marriage you can never get out of.

Layer all that together and the empty shelf makes sense. The bourbon exists. It's made. It's aging. Whether it reaches your town depends on a legal structure written in 1935, a state regime you didn't choose, and this year, on whether your distributor was still solvent in May.

In ten seconds

The honest note. I can't tell you which of these is the bigger factor for your particular store, and anybody who says they can is guessing. Demand is real — Buffalo Trace rations bottles at their own gift shop, one per person per day, in Frankfort, at the distillery. That's not a distribution problem. But the distribution collapse is equally real and it's in court filings. Both are true, they compound, and the mix is different in every state.

What I can tell you is what it isn't. It is not the distillery quietly cutting back, and it is not that they stopped making it. 9 million barrels says otherwise.

Where this comes from

We reported each of these as it happened, in the American Whiskey Industry Brief.

So what do you actually do. If you're in one of those 18 control states, your state runs official lotteries and in places like Ohio they're free to enter — that's the front door and most people never use it. If you live near a state line, understand that crossing it means a completely different distribution regime, not just a different store. And stop reading an empty shelf as a verdict on the whiskey. It usually isn't one.

If you want the pipes watched for you — who's buying whom, which distributor just collapsed, which state lost its route — that's what we do every morning. The Cut, our daily American whiskey brief: what happened, what it means, five minutes, free, at chasingtheunicornpodcast.com. I'll see you at the empty shelf.