Buffalo Trace Distillery is wrapping up the last phase of a major expansion, a project that included adding eight more 93,000 gallon fermenters.Harlen Wheatley is thrilled about the activity on campus."We're just really proud of what everybody does here," Wheatley said.According to Wheatley, over 750 employees work on the campus at Buffalo Trace."If you walk through, you're gonna see the pride in the products that we're making, and we just really like to show people what we're doing," Wheatley noted.With so much activity outside and inside on campus, there were required upgrades and new development in the form of a $1.2 billion expansion over ten years."We laid out the process into phases and we knew that we needed to make more whiskey," Wheatley said.The plan, laid out in three phases, allowed the distillery to double its distilling capacity."The tough part was to make sure there were no compromises. We wanted to build the exact replica still," Wheatley added.''Honor tradition, embrace change' is the distillery's motto, with its complete history tracing back to 1773.While this expansion is officially complete July 1, the distillery builds warehouses every two months, filling those warehouses as they build them with no plans to slow down."We're still in expansion mode when it comes to warehousing even though our distillery now is full capacity," Wheatley said.That motivates Wheatley, who's coming up on a big milestone. Harlen was named master distiller in 2005, but he's been with Buffalo Trace since 1995."There was only about six or seven distilleries at the time and for me I was lucky enough to have an opportunity here at Buffalo Trace and, you know, to stay here this whole time," Wheatley said.With decades of experience, Wheatley is addressing the future. Buffalo Trace is making products today that are going to sell in eight years."That's the difficult part is to figure out exactly how much to make every year," Wheatley said.Buffalo Trace has to project that from year to year since a lot of its products won't be sold until the year 2045.The tough part about that is to project the number of cases needed during planning and Buffalo Trace has several hundred labels to consider.The distillery is celebrating a milestone this year filling its 9-millionth barrel of whiskey. ...read more read less