Bardstown Bourbon

Bardstown Bourbon Company

Some of your favorite whiskies being produced 24/7

Bardstown Bourbon lays just 7 minutes from Haven Hill and 10 minutes from Willett, two major stops on the Bourbon Trail. It is located in, you guessed it, Bardstown, Kentucky. It is a city overflowing with whiskey history, having been dubbed the "bourbon capital of the world" by many and is the official head of the bourbon trail.

Founded in 2016, Bardstown Bourbon is very much a new player on the scene that has made a huge splash in the community. Not only have they begun producing their own highly acclaimed Bardstown Whiskey line, but they produce a long list of whiskies you are most likely familiar with.

Brands like Jefferson's, Calumet, High West, Belle Meade, and The Splinter Group make up just a piece of their portfolio.

Their sheer scale and volume of their production has led to a rigorous production schedule and systems that were custom designed to regulate the majority of their process automatically.

They produce whiskey 24/7 with only one official holiday where production ceases. It's out of necessity that they have this intense schedule. They measure every hour of their day with time block sheets to make sure they are able to meet their mind-bending production quotas.

Before you get to their massive mash rooms, towering grain silos, or cutting edge labs, you walk up to the angular steel, stone, and glass walled building. It has a very industrial feel to it, but embraces a lot of natural balance with their landscaping.

Once you pass through the doors, you're greeted by a beautifully simple yet elegant reception room.

Claiming the space is a wall of foliage with their logo front and center. It's a very modern feel that sets the tone for the rest of the tour.

The balance of modernist approach to traditional values and technique are what allow Bardstown to continue producing great whiskies at their near break-neck volume.

After you enter the main doors into the building from the reception room, you realize the distillery was built with much more than just production in mind.

They wanted to create an experience.

They have a dining and event room set up in a large open space. When we visited it was set up for a dinner service. There is lounge space towards the front, and large open windows peering into their sleek gift shop.

The Bardstown Bourbon crew definitely loves entertaining and is constantly looking for local events to host. From weddings to high-end tasting dinners, they are looking to become a destination for traveling events as well as a resource for their local community.

The mash room is unlike anything we've ever seen.

We have done dozens and dozens of tours from Kentucky all the way down to Florida. Bardstown has gone above and beyond in making their cookers state-of-the-art.

They adapted a monitoring system developed for another type of beverage manufacturing, and had it customized for making whiskey.

The system detects when things are out of alignment in the mash tub and can automatically add different amounts of water or other natural ingredients to re-balance the mash to specification so that every production is consistent and fine-tuned.

This allows them to continue producing a reliable and consistent end product while still keeping pace with their production volume.

The rickhouse Bardstown uses for presentations matches that same industrial rural fusion architecture as the main building. However, the inside is stacked high with aging barrels, and the presentation room is extravagant.

You walk through an impressive armada of barrels containing all types of whiskies, and into the presentation lounge. The room has a glass wall that allows you to look into the main area in the warehouse, which is set up with enough open space for presentation or mixers.

That's a unique setup and shows, again, that Bardstown had presentation and entertainment in mind when they were designing their buildings.

Bardstown bourbon has three primary "series" that their releases fall into.

There is the "fusion series" features a unique blend of different aged whiskies with widely varied mash bills to create unique flavors.

The "discovery series" uses varied ages and similar mash bills to create a more complex but straightforward blend.

The "collaborative series" has Bardstown partner up with quality partners to create unique blends and finishes to create new and exciting flavor experiences.

Each of these series' creates a unique product that has put their releases on the map and in bars around the country.

We got to try out the currently available lineup. We have to say, both the pours and the experience itself was wonderful.

"The Prisoner" was an incredible pour that we really geeked out on. The classic flavors of a sweet Tennessee whiskey were great and complex. Notes of vanilla and toasted caramel were beautifully accented by the drier notes of the red wine giving a berry and earthy undertone.

Overall, the experience was phenomenal. When you head to Kentucky, many people try to plan historic distilleries as their primary stops. However, if you overlook some of these younger distilleries, you could very well be short changing your own trip.

Some of theses distilleries, like Bardstown, are doing some awesome things, and are wonderful places to visit. If you're going to visit Bardstown, make sure you put Bardstown Bourbon on your schedule.