Bardstown Bourbon's Former Leaders are Building a Major New Kentucky Distillery
October 12, 2023 –––––– Whisky Advocate
John Hargrove, Daniel Linde, and David Mandell were part of the team behind Bardstown Bourbon Company when it was founded in 2014. In addition to the many top-flight whiskeys sold under the Bardstown name, the company has also produced liquid for more than 30 other labels as a custom contract producer, including Belle Meade, High West, Hirsch, James E. Pepper, Jefferson’s, to name a few.
Over the past four years, Hargrove, Linde, and Mandell have all left Bardstown, which last year was acquired by Chicago-based investment firm Pritzker Private Capital. But the three men didn’t leave behind their passion for whiskey: Last year they formed a company called Whiskey House of Kentucky, and earlier today they unveiled details about forward plans.
Whiskey House of Kentucky will be located on a 176-acre site in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, about 30 minutes west of Bardstown, and is slated to come on stream in July 2024. Its campus will include 16 rickhouses that will hold 41,500 barrels, a 50,000-square-foot palletized warehouse, a rail system, a bottling facility, and a distillery with 14 closed-top 33,000-gallon fermenters and a 48-inch custom still. The distillery’s annual capacity will be more than 7 million proof gallons or about 112,000 barrels to start. The company already has plans in place to increase to more than 14 million proof gallons (224,000 barrels) in 2027.
This is no small project by any means: the facility will be on a scale equivalent to Bardstown Bourbon. To put things further into perspective, Heaven Hill’s giant Bernheim Distillery in Louisville, which is among the biggest in the business, has an annual capacity of 450,000 barrels. Whiskey House has no plans to bottle expressions of its own but instead will do contract distilling for other whiskey labels.
