It wasn’t that long ago that a whiskey distillery in Kentucky was more like a factory than anything resembling a tourist attraction, at least as far as the consumer was concerned. Taking a tour of one would have been similar to touring a chemical plant or industrial bakery.

But with the rise in bourbon’s popularity over the past two decades, tourism has become a key player in the industry. And Kentucky’s craft distilleries are taking advantage in unique and disparate ways.

Now offering tours, tastings, history, barrel picks, food pairings and more, the little guys are giving bourbon consumers exactly what they want: a way to immerse themselves in bourbon culture. And it comes with a trio of key attributes: innovation, experiences and authenticity.

A small, family-owned distillery, for example, can make smaller batches of experimental products than a traditional mass-production facility, which invites innovation. Additionally, they are well equipped to offer unique experiences to consumers with a taste for whiskey. And without any corporate concerns, a craft distillery can offer increased transparency and intimacy.

For example, Pursuit Spirits in Louisville opened its tourist experience two years ago with an opportunity to first do a guided tasting, followed by selecting one of the whiskeys, and then not only thieving it from the barrel and bottling it, but also personally applying the label, inserting the cork and sealing the bottle. Now, that’s immersive.

“It’s been our marquee experience,” said Kenny Coleman, co-founder of the brand. “We just created a better mousetrap; a lot of people had a fill-your-own bottle experience, but nobody was doing it the way we’re doing it.”

It was an innovation in offering an experience, something Coleman and partner Ryan Cecil, who also are the founders of the Bourbon Pursuit podcast, carefully designed as a way to differentiate Pursuit Spirits.

“We wanted to have a raw, authentic experience that feels like a single-barrel selection,” Coleman added. “We want to give you a cool experience coming from people who enjoy doing this and aren’t just thinking about efficiencies.”

This sort of thinking permeates Kentucky’s bourbon landscape now. There now are nearly 50 craft distillers — distilleries that produce 1,000 to 10,000 barrels annually — that are members of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association (KDA). That’s three times as many as there are larger producers in the KDA. And they are strewn all over the state, inviting tourists to return again and again to soak up more and more of these experiences.

An unexpected rise

KDA President Eric Gregory took over leading the trade association in 2008, when there was a total of seven member distilleries. There now are 70.

Gregory said that early in his tenure he was talking with Woodford Reserve Master Distiller Chris Morris about the fact that a few small distilleries had opened up in Kentucky.

“We were like, ‘Who are these folks and why are they in Kentucky competing against Jim Beam and Wild Turkey?’” Gregory recalled. “But that’s exactly the reason they were here — they wanted to build upon the history and heritage of Kentucky bourbon.”

Morris reasoned at the time that all distilleries, be it Buffalo Trace or Heaven Hill, can trace their lineage back to a family-run distillery. This realization prompted the KDA to create the craft level of membership and to start welcoming those smaller operations to the state. Some grew in size; some didn’t.

“From then on, it just depended on their level of opportunity, their business plan,” Gregory said. “Some are very happy to just be a small local or regional distillery; some have dreams of being the next Maker’s Mark.”

For example, Kentucky Peerless Distilling revived a once-thriving heritage brand, starting small with limited releases. Master Distiller Caleb Kilburn essentially learned on the job for close to a decade at Peerless. He is now working to open his own distillery, Eastern Light Distilling, with an eye toward community. The farm on which Kilburn was raised, he said, is only about six miles from the distillery’s location on a ridge in Morehead.

The distillery will be a step up from a craft distillery in terms of potential scope, with 230 acres to develop and a projected capacity of about 100,000 barrels per year. But Kilburn expects it to still have the same authentic experiences of a craft distillery when it opens in 2026.

That authenticity seems to be baked into the pie these days as more and more tourists flock to Bourbon Country.

“This is very much a homecoming,” Kilburn said. “The community is family to me.”

He pointed out that Morehead has traditionally been a lumber hub in Eastern Kentucky, which to Kilburn meant the next logical step was to open a distillery. The goal is to work as closely as possible with other businesses and farms in the region to create a sort of cooperative ecosystem.

Another example of this type of bourbon authenticity is LF Heritage Distillery Co., which joined KDA as a craft-level member last year. The distillery is located on a farm replete with limestone springs and owned by a handful of Kentuckians, including farm owners Bethany and Darin Dillow, as well as former University of Kentucky football great Tim Couch, among others. Much like with Eastern Light, it doesn’t get much more Kentucky than that.

“When I started seeing the natural beauty and the partnership opportunities, it just made an immense amount of sense to establish a distillery in that community,” Kilburn said of launching Eastern Light. “We want to be community stewards, helping to build local prosperity and local pride. It’s about the authenticity.”

To grow or not to grow 

It wasn’t that long ago that distilleries like New Riff Distilling in Newport and Wilderness Trail Distillery in Danville were craft-sized operations. As of this past January, New Riff has become a nationally distributed brand while Wilderness Trail is in more than 20 states and in 2022 sold a majority of its stakes to Campari Group.

For craft distilleries like Pursuit Spirits and Buzzard’s Roost in Louisville, growth looks much different. Buzzard’s Roost has its main presence on Whiskey Row downtown; Pursuit has a small distillery in the Clifton neighborhood, with a Whiskey Row experience set to open sometime in April or May.

Much like Pursuit, Buzzard’s Roost prides itself on its blend of whiskey innovation and guest experiences. Co-founder Judy Hollis Jones said Buzzard’s Roost will continue to come up with new experiences for its customers. Not only does it contribute to the overall Bourbon Country experience, but it also gives visitors a reason to return.

One example of the experiences there is a group called the Ambuzzadors. Jones and co-owner Jason Brauner do virtual and live events with those fans regularly. Sometimes the Ambuzzadors are provided with whiskey samples or have a chance to participate in a barrel pick.

To coincide with this, the brand does three or four limited whiskeys each year, Hollis Jones said. For instance, a four-grain whiskey is in the works and a new formula for Buzzard’s Roost Cigar Rye will be released this year, as will a special whiskey for the Christmas season. And a new expression was recently announced: an everyday sipper called Buzzard’s Roost Double Oak Bourbon.

All this helps to grow the Buzzard’s Roost audience — a growth that doesn’t necessarily mean adding more stills or rickhouses.

“Short term, we continue to enhance the experiences available at Whiskey Row,” Hollis Jones said. “The number of visitors continues to increase. It’s so nice to see people are building relationships and are coming back to Kentucky more than once.”

Coleman likens these types of experiences to “mom and pop wineries” found in Napa Valley and Sonoma County in California. To his point, if you visit there, you don’t go just to visit Robert Mondavi; you go for the authenticity. It helps that in recent years, Kentucky made it legal for distilleries to serve cocktails on-site, which has been game-changing for distilleries of all sizes.

So, while he and Cecil plan to grow Pursuit Spirits over time, Coleman said, “We want to position ourselves to be like one of those small mom-and-pop wineries — they do 80% of their business based on tourism.”

So deeply have craft distilleries ingrained themselves into the full Kentucky experience that the Kentucky Distillers’ Association decided to roll the former Craft Bourbon Trail into the main Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Gregory said it finally made sense that it’s one big attraction, in part because out-of-state tourists, which make up the bulk of Kentucky’s bourbon tourism, come because of geography. If they’re planning to visit Beam, for instance, they’re going to look at what’s around that distillery and make plans to visit those attractions.

That helps further solidify that notion of authenticity.

“You go into a craft distillery and you’re going to see every bit of the process,” Gregory said. “Some of them have been built with tourists in mind, and it’s a great experience. Some of them were initially built with production in mind, so there might not be a lot of bells and whistles, but you’re going to get an authentic look at how you make whiskey.”

The KDA has seen incredible tourism growth as a result. For instance, Gregory said, in 2008, there were about 250,000 visitors to Kentucky bourbon attractions. Last year, he said, it was almost 3 million.

Look for that growth to continue with the ongoing rise of craft distilleries. After all, the little guys are built perfectly to facilitate bourbon’s true value.

“Whiskey, at the end of the day, is a conduit for conversation,” Coleman said. “We want to make sure you have that. It’s just one of those things when you have a ‘one of us’ kind of moment and you think you’ve found your tribe.”