Buffalo Trace is finally stopping counterfeiters, but didn’t tell anyone.
As the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection hit my area, I felt a nice calm knowing that without Stagg there is no chance in hell I’ll be able to land a bottle this year. The magic and excitement of BTAC season still came around though when a friend of mine scored an early Thomas H Handy.
After cracking the bottle (crazy, right?) he found a chip inside the foil cap. What could it be? Is this 5G? The same chip thats in the vaccines? Jokes aside, we figured it was just a security tag. Theft is common with liquor, would make sense, even though these babies end up locked away in a trophy case at a liquor store for years. But I needed to know more.
I had him try to hold his phone up to it to see if something magically popped up like those douchey business cards I keep getting instagram ads for. No dice. So I decided to figure out where the hell does Buffalo Trace get its caps from? Thank god everything is on the internet. From ImportYeti I found their aluminum cap provider and noticed this product with some magical NFC (Near Fields Communication) tags.
This has to be it! But what can we do? I had him download the Selinko app mentioned in the video to see if it registered. On the first try it just read back “invalid tag.” Maybe they just weren’t ready to start using this technology?
So we went on to the next app NFC Tools…..and Booooom! It worked! Not only does it register that the bottle is legit, but it can detect when the bottle is opened. This is insane.
The NFC tag within the foil should be compatible with most new smart phones. You might need an app, but it might just work without one. The tag likely is using a passive sensor to detect when the foil is opened, which is why we see the circuit continue down the side of the cap in the image towards the top.
For years we have heard about how Buffalo Trace is cracking down on counterfeiters, but it hasn’t been much more than a public notice to look to see if the label matches the foil or a jailing a couple idiots who try to sell on Craigslist.
For whiskey fans, this is a great step towards more honest dealings. Ironically it kind of helps the secondary market by making products verifiable, but at the same time protects buyers from unknowingly purchasing a fake product from a guy who shares a Facebook account with his wife.
I imagine in the future there will be a branded app just for this. Buffalo Trace will be able to keep better track of the bottles through the supply chain, provide more insights and marketing, and consumers will be able to rest assured, knowing they have the real thing. Either that or this is the greatest counterfeit ever, that added anti counterfeiting to fool people into thinking it is real.
Now I know what most of you are thinking now is, “cool, but I’m sure people will still be able to counterfeit this.” People could replicate the tags and create a fake version of the verification database, but there is why I think Buffalo Trace would likely release an app around it. Maybe people could spoof the NFC tag data and write it to counterfeits, but you’d hope that amount of activity on that tag might set off some sort of alerts on the backend. There is a lot that hasn’t been answered yet, so I’ll be eager to Buffalo Trace to make a bigger announcement around this and hopefully even more plans to prevent counterfeiters in the future.
*Update: There have been some reports of the new BTAC having the old caps. I have had a few people test on new bottles and it worked for some and failed for others. Guessing this isn’t going to be put in place this year.
Special Shout Out (Go follow him) to doitforthedram for kindly obliging to my many requests to try new things to get more info.
