E.H. Taylor Lands at $54.99, Five Under Expected — The Cut Weekend — S02E83

SE02E83 — The Week in the Glass

This is The Cut Weekend. I’m Franklin. Let’s set the hunt aside for a few minutes, because Saturday’s for walking back through the week that mattered.

If you squint at this week, one thread runs through nearly every story: people making long bets in a short-attention-span market. Monday, Heaven Hill broke ground on six new warehouses outside Bardstown while quietly cutting its own new-make production — building storage for whiskey it hasn’t sped back up to make yet. That’s not a distillery panicking. That’s a distillery betting the current glut clears before those barrels are ready, sometime in the mid-2030s. Tuesday, Peerless picked up approval for a second Louisville tasting room, giving people who’ve been chasing that brand online an actual door to walk through this fall. Wednesday brought the clearest number of the week — Buffalo Trace locking the next E.H. Taylor release at $54.99, a good five dollars under what everybody expected, even as Heaven Hill raised its value-tier wholesale prices in that same window. Same industry, same rising costs, two very different answers to what to do about it. And Thursday, Wilderness Trail’s co-founder tasted through thirty barrels of the distillery’s own wheated Bottled-in-Bond stock and hand-picked the one that became their first-ever single barrel release — no lottery, no distributor, just a counter in Danville. Put those four together and you get a week where the smart money wasn’t chasing the next hot bottle. It was investing in being the label people still trust a decade from now.

Which brings me to Friday, and the thing I actually want to sit with this weekend. A Louisville bar called The Rickhouse Room ran its sixth annual blind wheated bourbon showdown — Maker’s Mark, Larceny, and Weller Special Reserve, poured with the labels hidden. The owner, Sara Beth Hoagland, has been running this quarterly since 2020. That’s not a stunt — that’s close to a thousand scored pours by now, a real dataset. And here’s the part that got her own staff arguing: a trial run last week came back nearly even between Larceny and Weller. Weller carries the bigger reputation and the fatter secondary price tag. Larceny doesn’t. Strip the labels off, and the gap nearly disappears. I like this story because it doesn’t ask you to take anybody’s word for it. All three of those bottles sit within about fifteen dollars of each other at retail. You can run this exact test at your own table this weekend — pour three glasses, cover the labels, and let your own palate tell you something the price tag won’t.

Now, what’s still genuinely pourable while that thought sits with you. New Riff’s Bottled-in-Bond is restocked at Kentucky and Ohio accounts after heavier-than-usual sell-through — real hundred proof, four years minimum, under forty dollars. Larceny Barrel Proof B926 just got a national restock too, and it’s worth grabbing to taste against the last batch yourself. And if you’re anywhere near Frankfort this weekend, Buffalo Trace’s gift shop still has its walk-up allotment of the O.F.C. Vintage 1994 running through Sunday — one bottle a person, no reservation, against a secondary floor north of eighteen hundred dollars. Worth a look if you’re in the neighborhood.

That’s the week in the glass. If The Cut Weekend earned a few minutes of your Saturday, do me one favor — follow the show wherever you’re listening, so tomorrow’s edition finds you on its own. The written brief’s always free at chasingtheunicornpodcast.com, and the full American Whiskey Industry Brief is free every morning at chasingtheunicornpodcast.com. I’m Franklin. Pour something you like, share it with somebody worth sharing it with — and remember, your unicorn is out there.