The Age of the Staggerac, and Today
File Under: You Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone
There are many prisms through which I could view my career as a cocktail chronicler. One that hadn’t occurred to me til the other day was the lens of George T. Stagg.
George T. Stagg is an overproof bourbon put out by the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Kentucky. It is part of what they call their “Antique Collection,” an assortment of sought-after whiskeys that are released annually. It was once pretty obscure, known and beloved mainly by bourbon geeks and mixologists. I first heard about it twelve or so years ago on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. There’s a gentleman who lives in my neighborhood called Tiki Adam and we were talking about Big J’s, a local discount liquor store picturesquely located on the Gowanus Canal. Big J’s had good prices. “And,” Tiki Adam pointed out, “that’s where you can get George T. Stagg, the finest bourbon on the planet.”
I had to see this bottle. So I hoofed the unpretty blocks to Big J’s, a store with all the charm of the DMV. There was the Stagg, behind the counter on a high shelf, a tall, thin bottle filled with dark brown liquor. It was $80. Pretty steep, I thought. This bourbon better be good. I took a bottle home, though I could ill afford it at the time.
Today, you can’t get Stagg. Buffalo Trace didn’t release any in 2021, saying the barrels laid down back in 2006 weren’t up to snuff. If they had, though, it would have cost you plenty. The suggested retail price on Stagg is $99, which is one of the best jokes going. Any bottle you find on the internet begins at $1,000.
I thought about the strange and sad trajectory of Stagg availability recently when my mind suddenly alighted upon the memory of the Staggerac. The Staggerac was a Sazerac variation served at the New York cocktail bar PDT, starting in 2007. I had first heard about the drink from Jim Meehan, who ran PDT then. It wasn’t on the menu when I went to the bar, but the bartender knew what I was talking about and made me one anyway. They had to make a price up on the spot: $25. Again, I could ill afford it, but ordered one anyway. (This is why writers, who aren’t rich to begin with, don’t get rich, folks.)
Overproof whiskeys were not common back then—Stagg was 137 proof—and I was simply not prepared for the strength of the cocktail set before me. I thought I was taking it slowly, but by the time I was done with the drink my evening was clearly over. I paid the tab, staggered to the door (yes, the drink is aptly named) and went home.
Don Lee, a bartender at PDT, invented the Staggerac. He had learned about American whiskey at the elbow of LeNell Smothers, whose liquor store in Red Hook had one of the best bourbon and rye selections in the city. He would sometimes drive with Smothers to Kentucky to taste from barrels she was sourcing for her in-house Red Hook Rye. So, Lee was familiar with overproof whiskey.
“At the time when Buffalo Trace first put out their Antique Collection nobody knew about it and it was very affordable,” told Lee. “So [fellow PDT bartender] John Deragon and I would wait until the day it was released and just go around the city buying every bottle because it was just on shelves and wasn’t being collected yet.
“It felt totally normal and natural to put it in a cocktail when you’re role model for whiskey drinking is LeNell.”
That the Stagg ended up in a Sazerac—a cocktail which usually takes rye—was a symptom of the mixology obsessions of the moment. Lee pointed out that bartenders were all obsessed with the nature and mystery of the perfect Sazerac: “The ratio, the technique, if you chilled the glass, sourcing illegal absinthe from Europe, of you dropped the lemon peel, etc.”
Lee wasn’t an anomaly in putting a pricy, rare whiskey in an on-menu drinks. Cocktail bars and bartenders poured out the good stuff willy-nilly in the aughts. They knew what the good stuff was and where to find it, and the rest of the world hadn’t discovered their secrets yet. Moreover, mixologists were so jazzed about rediscovering the formulas behind classic cocktails, they didn’t think to skimp on any particular of a recipe, least of all the base spirit. The bartenders at Death & Co. put top-shelf spirits in nearly every cocktail. When Joaquín Simó invented the Naked and Famous cocktail, he used Del Maguey Chichicapa (now $70 a bottle). Phil Ward made his Oaxaca Old-Fashioned with El Tesoro reposado and Los Amantes Joven mezcal.
I was reminded of this state of affairs, when, after my Staggerac reverie, I posted this Tweet:
I wasn’t prepared for the response. A flood of remembrances of those halcyon days, from bartenders and customers alike, soon flowed in.
Eastern Standard in Boston also put Stagg in cocktails, read one. Milk & Honey had Pappy Van Winkle and Elijah Craig 12-year-old in the well. And the bar used Yamazaki 12-year-old—Japanese whiskey was another category that would soon be scarce and finally out of reach—for its Rob Roys. At Rickhouse in San Francisco, Yamazaki 12 was also mixed into cocktails.
“At Violet Hour, circa 2007, we were making Van Winkle Rye Sazeracs regularly,” bartender and Bittercube founder Ira Koplowitz wrote me. “The Pappy 15-year Bourbon was my favorite Old-Fashioned to make. At Bacchus in Milwaukee in 2010, we sold through two bottles of Black Maple Hill 23-year-old rye cocktails over a weekend. And at East Street Social in Minneapolis in 2012, we had Weller Antique in out house Old-Fashioned. The first year we went through like 200 cases!”
Over the over, the same names came up: Van Winkle, Yamazaki, Blanton’s, Stagg, Weller, Black Maple Hill. Bartenders, eager to get people back to the cocktail bar, treated their customers well back then. And they had no reason not to; the top-shelf whiskey was affordable and available. It’s doubtful drinkers knew how lucky there were at the time. When I ordered that Staggerac at PDT, I thought nothing of it. I could order another the next day if I wanted. Staggeracs could be my usual if I so chose.
In retrospect, it was an absurdly plentiful time. It wouldn’t last, of course. Demand for bourbon and rye went up, greed set in and the prices of the best whiskey went in only one direction. By 2012, the San Francisco liquor store Cask has a Stagg waiting list 170 names long.
The Twitter thread made me both happy and sad—happy at the great memories, sad that that time of great and affordable drinking was gone. Memory lane soon led me straight to PDT to see if I could duplicate that Staggerac experience from long ago. Of course, I couldn’t. To make the Staggerac today, PDT used Stagg Jr., the younger version of George T. Stagg that Buffalo Trace started putting out in 2013. Stagg Jr. is also hard to get, just not as hard; and it’s also expensive—three or four more times expensive than George T. Stagg was when the Staggerac was created.
I sipped at the Staggerac carefully, recalling how if knocked me on my ass that first time. The taste was familiar. It was the cocktail I remembered. My capacity must have increased in the past 15 years, however. Because I felt right as rain when I reached the bottle of the glass and sailed out into the night without a misstep.
Oh, PDT did actually have a bottle of George T. Stagg on the back bar. An ounce costs $145.
I could have had an OG Staggerac for only $290.
Staggerac recipe below: