A new distillery focusing solely on large-scale contract whiskey production is opening next year, according to a Thursday announcement. Whiskey House of Kentucky is set to be the first property of its kind in the area, and will begin operations on July 1, 2024.
Founded in 2022 by David Mandell, John Hargrove, and Daniel Linde — all former Bardstown Bourbon employees —Whiskey House will be located on 176 acres in the T.J. Patterson Industrial Park in Elizabethtown, Ky., where the state-of-the-art facility is currently being constructed from the ground up. According to a press release, the company will invest over $350 million into the project over the next decade, planning to employ approximately 50 people in 2024 and expand to over 100 employees by 2027. The distillery will not house any brand of its own, and will operate purely as a custom whiskey production facility and provide distillation and barrel aging services with competitive pricing.
“Whiskey House will reshape the contract whiskey market in the United States,” said co-founder and CEO Mandell in the release. “As the bourbon market continues to grow, we see the need for additional distilling capacity and more customer focused solutions. We will provide the highest-quality production, guaranteed capacity, and exceptional customer service for our brand partners.”
Whiskey House of Kentucky will consist of 16 traditional rickhouses, each with a capacity to hold 41,500 barrels, as well as a 50,000-square-foot palletized warehouse, a grain processing facility, a bottling facility, a rail system, and access to a limestone aquifer. In addition to the property’s impressive structure, the Whiskey House will provide a fully integrated information technology system that captures and analyzes data across the manufacturing process. The company plans to use the information obtained from this to continuously improve its efficiency, increase yields, and refine its sustainability initiatives.
“For the first time, our customers will have access to every data-point about their whiskey from start to finish,” says engineering & technology vice president Roger Henley. “Not only will this information enable brands to create more innovative products and share more compelling stories about their whiskies, but it will also help optimize their businesses with critical financial, inventory, and quality reports.”
Mandell says he believes that the project will “reshape the contract whiskey market in the United States.” As the U.S. market has seen a boom in bourbon’s popularity in recent years, facilities that increase production seem like a good bet.
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