Nickolaus Hines
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At Stellar Jay, the rooftop bar on top of the Populus hotel, a Paper Plane cocktail made with Old Weller Antique 107 pours from a tap line. The bourbon, which drinkers in most of the country can barely get their hands on, flows as freely as beer already mixed in a cocktail.
“It really blows people’s minds that we have the ability to have cocktails on tap, not to mention cocktails with a premium spirit like Weller 107,” says EJ Psilas, bar lead at Stellar Jay and Pasque, who has spent 18 years behind Denver bars.
For most of the past decade, Antique 107 on tap would have been a very expensive stunt. Like other Weller bottles, it is hard to find outside of the jacked-up prices on the resale market. Weller has the same mash bill and is made at the same Buffalo Trace distillery as Pappy Van Winkle, but the biggest factor that keeps bottles primarily in the hands of collectors and bourbon fanatics is that supply couldn’t keep up with demand.
That supply is finally catching up, at least in Colorado. The brand picked the state as the first for increased access to the full lineup of Weller whiskeys — the “Weller rainbow,” as collectors call the six whiskeys with different color labels. Weller brand manager Charley Costa credits a distillery expansion that ran roughly a decade and cost more than a billion dollars that finished last year. While Colorado shelves and backbars get the fruits of that expansion first, drinkers in other states are stuck with the same supply issues as the past.
Provided by Weller Bourbon
“Last year we were able to get a few bottles of the Special Reserve pretty regularly (maybe two a month) and we could get a bottle of one or two of the other expressions a few times a year,” says Keegan Labrador of Culinary Creative Group, which runs Sorry Gorgeous, A5 and Bar Dough. Enough to stock, but not enough to pour freely and consistently. Labrador adds that “Denver was a special market that was selected to receive the majority of the new production.”
Costa says the goal was for people to walk into their store or bar of choice and consistently find Weller Special Reserve on the shelf for the first time. That goes for big-box stores, but also the local independent powerhouses like Argonaut that attract rare spirits lovers and can quickly move bottles.
A changed approach
Denver bars quickly took advantage of the supply. At Sorry Gorgeous, several Weller expressions sit on the back bar and the menu carries a tasting flight of three different Paper Planes. At A5, the group’s downtown steakhouse, Weller is the house whiskey and turns up in an Amaretto Sour. At Bar Dough in LoHi, it is the house whiskey again, in an Amaretto Old Fashioned.
“We have always been proud to offer Weller Special Reserve on the back bar at our bars,” Labrador says, “but before the availability opened up, we could never feature it in a cocktail, so that has been a really wonderful change.”
Provided by Weller Bourbon
Making it the house pour also meant taking someone else off. “We have chosen to feature Weller in place of some other brands in some instances,” he says. “For us, cocktail placement is always driven first by the flavor profile and how a specific spirit works in the drink. Then we consider price points and relationships secondary.”
Weller in the well is one thing. It is something else entirely to have Weller on tap. Costa says watching a 107-proof Weller bourbon go on draft was not what the Weller team anticipated when supply caught up. The idea came up during a tasting at Stellar Jay, half as a joke, until Psilas made it clear he meant it.
Competition as Colorado whiskey finds its own
Buffalo Trace declined to share how much whiskey it is shipping to Colorado, citing the company’s private ownership, but Costa had some sales data he could share from Nielsen. The American whiskey category in Colorado has been shrinking year over year. However, he says that Weller is one of only two of Colorado’s top 14 American whiskey brands with growing sales since expanding shipments.
The supply comes at the same time Colorado’s own whiskey is getting much-deserved recognition from major spirits awards. A wave of famous, now-affordable Kentucky bourbon might be expected to land badly. Local distillers and bartenders say otherwise.
Sean Kenyon, owner of Williams & Graham and Occidental, and a brand ambassador for Woody Creek Distillers, says that framing out-of-state versus in-state whiskeys as competition is a false comparison.
“Availability and provenance answer two completely different questions,” he says. “Weller becoming more available is a good thing. It lets more people experience a whiskey that was artificially difficult to find for years. But Woody Creek isn’t competing with that story. Woody Creek’s story starts in the fields and in the distillery, not on a shelf.”
Provided by Branch and Barrel
Mitchell Nester, master blender at Branch & Barrel, which makes its own wheated bourbon, says more Weller might even be a good thing for Colorado whiskey. “Honestly, it’s an opportunity,” he says. “It puts more people in the aisle actively thinking about the style. Some of them are going to want to learn what a wheated bourbon tastes like when it’s made an hour from where they live, with water and ingredients that aren’t coming from anywhere else. That’s not a knock on Weller; it’s simply our unique story, and we think that’s what makes a difference with the drinker once they are interested enough to be standing in that aisle.”
Nester says customers have moved to Branch & Barrel from Weller after tasting the difference Colorado grain, water and altitude make. “This is Colorado whiskey, not whiskey that happens to be sold in Colorado.”
Root Shoot Spirits sales director Heyward Gualandi says Weller’s choice to increase supply in Colorado first “highlights another key point” about the state’s whiskey drinkers as well as its producers. “Colorado whiskey enthusiasts are special,” Gualandi says. “Consumers here have great palates and are savvy — we know, as we’ve been courting them for years.”
Buffalo Trace seems to agree. Costa points to a population that drinks and knows whiskey, paired with a Denver cocktail scene willing to do something fun with a bottle instead of reserving it for upcharged neat pours only the dedicated want to pay for. Anthony Hinojos, Weller’s Colorado representative, says he has worked in markets where distillers treat each other as threats, and Colorado is not one of them.
Stellar Jay’s Psilas also sees the local and out-of-state options feeding each other. Out-of-town guests order what they know, he says, which gives him an opening to steer them toward something made here. “I can do the same thing for local whiskey drinkers, opening their eyes to fantastic bourbons we haven’t had readily available in Colorado for years,” he says.
Weller won’t share which states will get more supply after Colorado, or when. Until then, Weller hunters will likely keep stocking up on the bottles that are more available and more affordable than in their home states. And if the oft-repeated cliché of a rising tide lifts all boats holds true, they might also fall for some whiskey made in Colorado, too.
