From Vermont to Kentucky: WhistlePig on the Move

Vermont-based WhistlePig has been making moves in Kentucky. Last December, the distillery opened the Development Depot, a production facility in Brandenburg—a city on the banks of the Ohio River just under an hour southwest of Louisville—that’s capable of distilling 50,000 gallons a year. That same month also saw the debut of the WhistlePig Vault, a brand home in Louisville’s NuLu neighborhood that features whiskey tastings, bespoke cocktails, and a retail space.

The 4,000-square-foot Development Depot, which opened to the public earlier this month, features a 270-gallon still that’s designed predominantly for experimentation—more one-off mashbills and innovative flavors. Each batch will amount to about 600 gallons of whiskey. Apart from its production capabilities, the site has a tasting room and a retail area that sells single barrel releases made on-site. It’s open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.

But WhistlePig’s main Kentucky attraction is still The Vault in Louisville. A 5,000-square-foot space, previously known as the WhistlePig PiggyBank, The Vault is housed within a restored former bank vault built in 1911. Central to the site are three tasting experiences: a standard tasting of WhistlePig’s signature whiskeys hosted in its Bank Lobby Bar; a more premium, private experience that features some of the distillery’s older, more exclusive whiskeys; and a prestige tasting aimed at collectors, held within the building’s vault and takes guests through the rarest WhistlePig releases, including the full Boss Hog collection. If a tasting isn’t in the offing, guests can post up at the Bank Lobby Bar for bespoke cocktails or neat pours.

For now, these two sites will serve as WhistlePig’s sole Kentucky outposts. Until recently, the distillery also had a barrel aging site in Moriah, New York, but it was sold for $17 million following months of back-and-forth with neighbors over whiskey fungus-related concerns (though the state did recently renew its distilling license with New York State). Its home base is still in Shoreham, Vermont, on a 500-acre farm where much of its rye and other grains are grown, and it also owns a tasting room in Queechee, as well as a tasting and retail outpost in Stowe.