How Buzzard’s Roost Is Crafting a Delicious Slow Sipping Bourbon
Buzzard’s Roost Whiskey launched in 2019 with an interesting business model: buying great barrels of whiskey and enhancing them with additional time in specially treated new casks. Early releases included many rye whiskeys, one of which was finished in a toasted barrel. Now the brand has released a four-year-old barrel-strength Bourbon that is a blend of four and six-year-old Indiana Bourbons with different mash bills.
The Bourbon is 114.4 proof and retails for $84.99.
Jason Brauner Buzard's Roost
Crafting a Vintage Experience
“I just want whiskey that people can join around, come and sit, sip a while, kind of a shake the harshness of the day off, just something you can, we always say, come and roost a while, where you can just sit and hang out and almost just slow things down a little bit,” says one of the three Founders, Jason Brauner. “Today is a hectic for everybody. I want a sippin’ whiskey, that's what I've always wanted, and I think that's prevalent with our ryes and we'll be with our Bourbons. Moving forward, I definitely love the old school flavors from way back when, in the 40s and 50s. And maybe even the times. So I kind of love the flavor of those whiskeys back then, and I eventually wanna try to get to those flavors, those really rich, complex flavors that whiskey had back in the day and maybe bring back some of the old ways that people used to just hang out and not have to be on their phones and watch the TV and just relax a little bit and just hang out. And it's about friendships, it's about conversation, it's about hanging out and roosting a while.”
Brauner is best known for creating one of Louisville’s first Bourbon-themed restaurants, Bourbons Bistro, which opened in 2005, before most people outside of Kentucky knew there was a Bourbon boom happening.
In order to put a mark on the Bourbon industry, the options are to build a distillery or source whiskey, usually some combination of the two. Buzzard’s Roost is focusing on purchasing great barrels of whiskey and treating them with the different types of wood and cooking they have been researching together with the innovators at Independent Stave Cooperage.
The idea came from the desire to create vintage-tasting whiskeys with what was already available today.
Aiming for Lower Proof
“We're still getting to some of the higher proof whiskeys today, and back in the day, it didn't have to be that,” Brauner says. “Hopefully once we get to our contract work we'll be able to get just 100 proof. We'll be able to get all of those flavors that you're finding right now at 115, sometimes 120-proof whiskeys. You're going to be able to find that in 100 proof whiskey. I know back in the day, a lot of them were 80-86 proof, great whiskeys, I think I'd love to have them at 100, but that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the sneaky good whiskey, right at about 100 proof that could stand up to a cocktail if you wanted to make it, or just like I said, it's always about sitting around sipping for me.”
The team is always experimenting with new treatments for the wood in the barrels. Some is toasted, some is wood-charred, and some is cooked with proprietary or experimental methods. All Buzzard’s Roost is re-barreled into their proprietary barrels after being purchased at age to create the new flavor profiles they are going for.
Building the Brand
Small Brauner says he’s looking for whiskey that is “sneaky-good,” or something that is easy drinking and unexpected.
“Sneaky good whiskey it's different than it used to be because I love vintage whiskeys, but today, when you can find a young whiskey like ours, that's high proof, but it doesn't taste like that,” he says. “It tastes like it's got more age than it does. It tastes like a 10-year-old whiskey. I can remember having an Old Fitzgerald from the 40s, and it may have been six years old, is just some of the best whiskey ever. We can make that today. Now, you get the accountants involved and all of that, do they do that? No, but I'm gonna push really hard to find a four to six-year whiskey at about 100 proof that tastes like a 10-year whiskey, that has the complexity of an older whiskey.”
You may not have heard of Buzzard’s Roost Whiskey yet, but Brauner and his team hope that will change soon.
“We're just working hard every day to grow the brand, we're a grassroots type thing, we're in a couple of states right now, we've got some aspirations to be in about 7 to 10 states by the first of 2022. We just want to put our whiskey in people's hands, and once you do it, they're taken by it. They enjoy it, they're surprised by what we've done in such a short period of time, and I really love where we're going, and we're just kind of, I always kinda bring up old school, but we're just growing in an old school fashion, and I hope people appreciate it.”