From Maker's Mark to Making Their Own Whiskey

For decades, Denny Potter and Jane Bowie both enjoyed what they call “the two greatest jobs in the industry.” The pair met at Maker’s Mark in 2006, when Potter was in his third year as distillery manager and Bowie had just been hired as a global brand ambassador. A fast friendship followed. While Potter left Maker’s Mark in 2010 and went on to have stints at Cruzan Rum and Heaven Hill before ultimately landing back at Maker’s in 2018, Bowie stayed on for 16 years; she eventually became the distillery’s head of blending and innovation. Then, last fall, despite having ample security with those “two greatest jobs,” Potter and Bowie left Maker’s (on great terms, they emphasize) to pursue a shared dream of running their own distillery.

“You always imagine going out on your own, and what you would do,” says Bowie. “We used to play distillery fantasy camp; what kind of fermentation cycles would you have, or how would you age? As we both started getting older in our careers, it was just a decision: ‘We should do this.’”

“This” has culminated in Potter Jane Distillery, a $50 million, 36,000-square-foot project located on 153 acres of land in Springfield, Kentucky, a town that lies smack between Louisville and Lexington but 60 miles to the south. Potter and Bowie broke ground on the distillery three months ago, and expect it will be up and running by early 2025.

The pair designed the distillery, with an efficient layout that simplifies the process: Grain will come in and go from the cooker to the fermenter to the still to the cistern and then out. Once concrete is poured and the foundation is ready, a 36-foot column still will be installed, along with two 10,000-gallon mash tubs and ten 20,000-gallon fermenters. All told, Potter Jane will have the capacity to produce 45,000 barrels annually (around 150 barrels a day), and while just two 24,000-barrel warehouses will be built on-site at first, eventually the plan is to have a total of 15 warehouses, with one of those dedicated exclusively to more experimental whiskeys. All warehouses will face north-to-south, and emphasize airflow and natural sunlight, creating microclimates that experience plenty of heat and humidity.

As for the whiskey they’ll be making at Potter Jane, Potter and Bowie aren’t aiming to reinvent the wheel. “We’re not doing anything radical; we’re combing 42 years of experience and making bourbon that we love to drink, the sort that made us fall in love with whiskey in the first place,” says Bowie, explaining that a focus on fermentation and entering whiskeys into the barrel at a lower entry proof will be among the distillery’s calling cards. Wheated bourbon, high-rye bourbon, and a small amount of rye whiskey will initially be produced, with a long-term goal of getting the whiskeys to around 7 to 8 years old.

While they wait for the distillery to be completed and their own whiskeys to age, Potter and Bowie have no interest in either contract distilling their own recipes at another distillery or sourcing whiskey. Once Potter Jane’s doors are open, however, Bowie says they will contract distill for others as a means of keeping the lights on. “We’re grateful that we will have contract whiskeys to make, to give us time to learn the maturation curve of our own product,” she explains. “You can plan all you want, but until you have your product on that site with that provenance, there’s a DNA that lives at a distillery that you can’t control or just don’t know yet.” To keep their creative gears turning, they've also dabbled in other projects—at the groundbreaking, for instance, they made beer with a local brewery.

For his part, Potter sees this as the time to write his (and Bowie’s) own Kentucky family story. “When you have to go and tell someone like Rob [Samuels, the managing director of Maker’s Mark] that you’re leaving, and give him the reason you’re leaving, it felt like we could, because we’re trying to do exactly what his grandparents did,” says Potter. “They started Maker’s Mark. We told that generational story at Maker’s, we saw those sorts of stories all around us, and we thought, ‘Why can’t we go make our own generational story?’”