I Lost to Buffalo Trace by One Point
A few years into learning how to make whiskey, I decided to hold a blind taste test with my family. This was either a bold move or a deeply ignorant one. Sometimes those overlap.
I had spent months working on a bourbon-inspired recipe I called “Bourbana,” partly because you can’t call rapid-aged moonshine “Bourbon” and partly because I live in Urbana, Ohio. For the taste test, we lined up five unlabeled samples. Four versions of my recipe. One control sample: Buffalo Trace. Dad’s favorite.
Eleven family members, with scorecards and pencils in hand, commenced tasting the spirits. In the end, Buffalo Trace won by one point, which told me one of three things:
I landed on a pretty good recipe, or
Everyone felt sorry for me, so they threw me a bone, or
My family has no business judging whiskey
Honestly, I was thrilled. If you’re going to lose, losing by one point to one of the most recognizable bourbons in America is a decent way to do it. But the score wasn’t what stayed with me.
Dad tasted one of the glasses and immediately wrote “Buffalo Trace” on his card like he was answering a question on a third-grade spelling test. No hesitation. No theatrics. No studying the color against the light. He just knew.
By then, he had already spent years in a wheelchair, in constant pain, suffering the kind of physical hardship that would make most people give up. But he never became that guy. There was no “quit” in him.
What struck me sitting there at that table was how deeply he understood something he loved. Not because he had studied tasting notes or joined whiskey forums or developed a sophisticated vocabulary for caramel undertones and oak structure. He just paid attention.
That’s probably also true of every genuine expert I’ve ever met in business. The best often sound almost casual when describing things other people completely miss. It looks like instinct from the outside, but it’s usually accumulated attention.
Fourteen months after that taste test, Dad was gone.
We scattered his ashes on Lake Erie where he loved to fish. We said a few words, then passed a bottle of Buffalo Trace around the boat. Even Mom, who does not drink and would probably prefer that the rest of us didn’t either, took a pull from the bottle and immediately made a face that suggested she had serious concerns about our life choices.
But we couldn’t have said goodbye any other way.
I still think about losing by one point to Buffalo Trace. Not because I’m upset about it, but because most meaningful work in life lives in that tiny space between pretty good and genuinely great.
