Kentucky
22 distilleries
Sponsored
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Kentucky
Barrel House Distilling Co.
Barrel House Distilling holds a unique place in Kentucky bourbon history: it was Kentucky's first craft distillery, founded in 2008 by longtime friends Jeff Wiseman and Peter Wright. When they launched with Pure Blue Vodka in 2008, they were pioneers in an era when "craft distillery" didn't yet m...
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Kentucky
Angel's Envy Distillery
Angel's Envy is bourbon's most audacious modern success story. In 2010, Wes Henderson convinced his late father, legendary Master Distiller Lincoln Henderson, to come out of retirement for one final project.
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Kentucky
Bardstown Bourbon Company
Bardstown Bourbon Company is bourbon's answer to Napa Valley—a collaborative distillery on a 100-acre farm that makes bourbon for dozens of brands simultaneously. Four visionary founders (Peter Loftin, David Mandell, Daniel Linde, Garnett Black) had a radical idea: instead of building a distiller...
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Kentucky
Buffalo Trace Distillery
Buffalo Trace is the oldest continuously operating distillery in America, a distinction that comes with serious historical weight. The site has been making spirits since 1775 when Hancock Lee and his brother Willis Lee started distilling there.
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Kentucky
Castle & Key Distillery
In 1887, Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr. built something that had never existed before: a distillery designed as a tourist destination.
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Kentucky
Copper & Kings American Brandy Co.
Copper & Kings was born in 2014 when South African beverage entrepreneur Joe Heron decided to make American brandy in the heart of bourbon country—a deliberate provocation. While Kentucky obsesses over bourbon, Heron asked: "What if we made the world's best brandy here?" He chose the Butchertown ...
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Kentucky
Four Roses Distillery
Four Roses is a bourbon with a romantic origin story that feels more like fiction than fact. Paul Jones Jr.
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Kentucky
Green River Distilling Co.
Green River is one of Kentucky's oldest bourbon stories, with roots stretching back to 1885 when J.W. McCulloch founded the original Green River Distilling Company.
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Kentucky
Heaven Hill Distillery
Heaven Hill's origin is pure American grit-and-luck. In 1935, just after Prohibition ended, brothers Ed, George, and Joel Shapira—ambitious young businessmen from Louisville with zero distilling experience—made an audacious bet.
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Kentucky
Jim Beam Distillery
The Jim Beam dynasty is one of bourbon's most storied family sagas, stretching back nearly 230 years. Jacob Beam, a German immigrant farmer, started distilling whiskey around 1795 in Washington County, Kentucky, selling his first barrels of corn whiskey as "Old Jake Beam." That single decision la...
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Kentucky
Limestone Branch Distillery
Limestone Branch Distillery is the story of American bourbon continuity—7 generations of a family refusing to let history die. Brothers Stephen and Paul Beam founded the distillery in 2010, not in some nostalgic vacuum, but as a direct continuation of their family's distilling heritage that trace...
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Kentucky
Lux Row Distillers
Lux Row Distillers is the physical embodiment of Luxco's evolution from spirits distributor to bourbon producer. Luxco, founded in 1958 as the David Sherman Corporation, spent over 60 years acquiring and managing bourbon brands—Rebel Yell, Ezra Brooks, David Nicholson, Blood Oath—before deciding ...
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Kentucky
Maker's Mark Distillery
Maker's Mark is the smallest distillery in Kentucky by volume, but don't mistake size for influence. T.
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Kentucky
Michter's Distillery
Michter's has one of the strangest origin stories in bourbon: a Swiss Mennonite farmer named John Shenk started distilling rye whiskey in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania in 1753—making it one of America's oldest continuously-operating distillery brands. The brand survived Prohibition, Temperance mov...
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Kentucky
New Riff Distilling
New Riff Distilling's origin story isn't bourbon heritage passed through generations—it's entrepreneurial bourbon passion catching fire in a modern age. Ken Lewis built The Party Source, one of the region's landmark spirits retailers, before realizing he wanted to move from selling whiskey to mak...
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Kentucky
Old Forester Distillery
George Garvin Brown, a former pharmaceutical salesman with an obsession for consistency, created something revolutionary in 1870: the first bourbon whiskey bottled exclusively in sealed glass bottles with his personal signature on each one. This wasn't just marketing genius—it was a guarantee.
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Kentucky
Rabbit Hole Distillery
Kaveh Zamanian's pivot from psychology to bourbon is one of bourbon country's most unlikely and compelling origin stories. Born in Tehran in 1979, he fled Iran's Islamic Revolution at age 14, landing in California with his family.
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Kentucky
Wild Turkey Distillery
Jimmy Russell is 70 years into working at what is now known as Wild Turkey, making him the longest-tenured spirits Master Distiller in the entire world. He walked through the distillery doors on September 10, 1954, at age 18, sweeping floors, and never left.
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Kentucky
Wilderness Trail Distillery
Wilderness Trail's founding story defies bourbon convention: a plant pathologist and a mechanical engineer decided to make bourbon by studying what worked at other distilleries and executing with engineering precision. Dr.
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Kentucky
Willett Distillery / Kentucky Bourbon Distillers
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Kentucky
Willett Distillery / Kentucky Bourbon Distillers
Willett's story is bourbon's most audacious family saga—part heritage, part reinvention, part speculative art collecting. The original Willett distillery dates to 1936, but its real legend begins in 1984 when Even Kulsveen, a Norwegian immigrant who worked as a merchant marine, chef, and glass de...
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Kentucky
Woodford Reserve Distillery
Woodford Reserve sits on Kentucky's oldest distilling site, where Elijah Pepper began making whiskey in 1812—the same year Buffalo Trace built its first distillery building. The site is a National Historic Landmark, recognized for the continuous distillation that began over 200 years ago.
Tennessee
7 distilleries
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Tennessee
Corsair Artisan Distillery
Corsair Artisan Distillery emerged from a garage beer-brewing hobby in Nashville in 2008, when childhood friends Darek Bell and Andrew Webber pivoted from homebrewing to the more intellectually challenging (and rewarding) world of distillation. Originally launched in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Cors...
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Tennessee
George Dickel Distillery
George A. Dickel was a Nashville businessman who built a liquor wholesaling empire in the 1860s-1890s, distributing whiskey throughout the South and beyond.
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Tennessee
Jack Daniel's Distillery
In the 1850s, a young enslaved boy named Jack Daniel began learning the art of distilling from an enslaved master distiller named Nathan "Nearest" Green, who worked for Reverend Dan Call in Lincoln County, Tennessee. Green's expertise in what would become known as the Lincoln County Process—filte...
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Tennessee
Nelson's Green Brier Distillery
Here's a story that got erased by Prohibition: In 1860, the Nelson family founded a whiskey distillery in Tennessee that became so successful it eventually outsold Jack Daniel's. By 1885, the Nelson distillery was producing 380,000 gallons of whiskey annually—the largest producer of sour mash whi...
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Tennessee
Ole Smoky Distillery
Ole Smoky Distillery opened its doors on July 4, 2010, riding the wave of Tennessee's first-ever change in state law that legalized distillation of spirits. This wasn't just a business opportunity—it was a **cultural moment**.
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Tennessee
Sugarlands Distilling Company
Sugarlands Distilling Company launched in 2014—later than Ole Smoky (2010) but tapping into the same legal shift that enabled Appalachian moonshining to emerge from shadows into commercial legitimacy. The name itself is rooted in regional history: "Sugarlands" is the local vernacular for the holl...
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Tennessee
Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey
Uncle Nearest is the most powerful comeback story in American whiskey. In 2016, entrepreneur Fawn Weaver was traveling abroad with her husband when she discovered a New York Times article about Nathan "Nearest" Green—a formerly enslaved man who taught a young Jack Daniel to make Tennessee whiskey.
Colorado
3 distilleries
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Colorado
Breckenridge Distillery
Bryan Nolt founded Breckenridge Distillery in 2007 with a radical idea: build a world-class bourbon distillery at 9,600 feet elevation in the Rocky Mountains. Not in Kentucky.
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Colorado
Leopold Bros. Distillery
Scott and Todd Leopold opened their first operation as an eco-brewery in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1999, bringing complementary skills from different worlds: Todd trained as a fermentation scientist at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago and attended distilling school in Lexington, Kentuck...
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Colorado
Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey
The origin of Stranahan's is a classic American tale of chance, passion, and wildfire. In 1998, Jess Graber was a volunteer firefighter responding to a barn fire on a property in the foothills outside Denver.
Indiana
2 distilleries
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Indiana
MGP Ingredients (Ross & Squibb Distillery)
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Indiana
MGP Ingredients (Ross & Squibb Distillery)
MGP's Indiana facility is the most important distillery you've never heard of. It sits in the shadow of a category that obsesses over provenance, terroir, craft, and "non-distiller producer" shame.
New York
4 distilleries
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New York
Hillrock Estate Distillery
Hillrock Estate Distillery is field-to-glass in a way most American distilleries only aspire to achieve. On 400 acres in Columbia County, Hudson Valley, owner Jeffrey Baker and his team grow their own barley, rye, and corn.
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New York
Kings County Distillery
Colin Spoelman grew up in Harlan, Kentucky, where he'd make regular trips home to visit family and return to Brooklyn with jugs of bootleg moonshine—contraband that became legendary at parties. In 2009, inspired by those liquid memories and armed with college roommate David Haskell and a dream to...
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New York
Tuthilltown Spirits / Hudson Whiskey
In 2003, Ralph Erenzo and Brian Lee converted a granary in a historic 1788 gristmill into New York's first legal distillery since Prohibition. The Tuthilltown Gristmill itself is legendary—it was the longest continuously operating mill in New York State history and now sits on 30+ pristine acres ...
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New York
Widow Jane Distillery
Widow Jane is a Brooklyn bourbon story with geographic soul. In 2010, founders Daniel Preston and Vince Oleson decided to make bourbon in New York City—specifically in Red Hook, a neighborhood undergoing its own revival.
Oregon
2 distilleries
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Oregon
Bull Run Distillery
Lee Medoff started his spirits career at McMenamins, Oregon's legendary craft beer outfit, before co-founding House Spirits in 2004 where he helped birth Aviation Gin and other craft classics. But Medoff had a singular obsession: water.
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Oregon
Westward Whiskey
Christian Krogstad moved to Portland in 1991 with a singular mission: to make beer. After years in craft brewing, he caught the whiskey bug when a brewery owner distilled his washes into something entirely different.
Texas
5 distilleries
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Texas
Balcones Distilling
Chip Tate arrived in Texas from Virginia with a background in nuclear physics, technical writing, and beer brewing. He took a job as dean of graduate studies at Baylor, then quit in 2008 to start a whiskey distillery in an old welding shop under a bridge in Waco.
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Texas
Garrison Brothers Distillery
Dan Garrison quit a tech career, moved to the Hill Country, and in 2006 obtained the first legal stiller's permit for bourbon distilled outside Kentucky and Tennessee. That detail matters — before Garrison Brothers, you couldn't legally make bourbon anywhere but Kentucky and Tennessee.
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Texas
Treaty Oak Distilling
Daniel Barnes founded Treaty Oak in 2006, the fourth distillery to operate in Texas post-Prohibition. The original location was a stepping stone.
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Texas
TX Whiskey / Firestone & Robertson Distilling Co.
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Texas
TX Whiskey / Firestone & Robertson Distilling Co.
Leonard Firestone and Troy Robertson started Firestone & Robertson in 2010 with a vision: create classic whiskey expressions with distinct Texas provenance. Not "bourbon made in Texas," but "Texas bourbon" — different thing.
