O.F.C. Old Fashioned Copper Vintage 1993 Bottle #280

O.F.C. stands for Old Fashioned Copper, the name of the distillery that E.H. Taylor Jr. established on the banks of the Kentucky River in 1869 – and which, through another 130 years of expansion and name changes, became the Buffalo Trace distillery of today. Taylor only owned the site for a few years before losing it to creditors, but in that time he established it as the model of a modern commercial distillery and his whiskey as the very definition of modern bourbon.

Buffalo Trace is no stranger to luxury bourbon, being the home to such lauded lines as Van Winkle, the Antique Collection, the Wellers and, of course, the E.H. Taylor series. But the O.F.C. whiskeys are almost in a class by themselves. Unlike most whiskeys, which rarely even reveal the year they were bottled, O.F.C.is  identified by the year it went into barrels. Only eight such vintages have been released, all of them ridiculously old and ridiculously small in number: the 1980 vintage had just 100 bottles, and, not to be outdone, the 1982 and 1983 vintages had just 50 each. The 1993 vintage, released in 2018, comprised a total of 822 bottles.

Each vintage varies by mash bill and aging profile, and each bottle is made from hand-cut crystal housed in a wooden box. The front lettering is made from copper inlay, and the labels are hand applied. It is the closest any American whiskey has come to the ultra-lux bottlings found in the very highest-end Scotch.

Producer: Buffalo Trace

 Misc.: Some historians believe that O.F.C. stood for Old Fire Copper, a reference to the direct-fired stills once common in Kentucky – even though Taylor, in his passion for the latest technology, used steam to heat his stills.

 Collectors’ tips: This is bottle No. 280 of 822.