Early Times Distillery
The Early Times Distillery , also Brown-Forman Distillery , formerly The Old Kentucky Distillery , is a whiskey distillery in Shively , Kentucky, a suburb of Louisville . The distillery belongs to the Brown Forman group. The Whiskey Early Times and (from 1870) the Bourbon Whiskey Old Forester are produced there . Woodford Reserve whiskey probably also comes from this distillery , since the nearby Woodford Reserve distillery , which also belongs to Brown Forman, produces significantly less whiskey than is sold to Woodford Reserve.
history
The distillery was built in 1935 as the Old Kentucky Distillery after the end of Prohibition in the United States. The distillery has been producing Early Times there since 1940. Brown-Forman, one of the few companies allowed to manufacture medicinal whiskey during the prohibition era , bought the brand, inventory, and what was then the Early Times Distillery in Bardstown , Kentucky in 1923. Early Times was the best-selling bourbon in the United States in the post-war years, so Brown-Forman extensively renovated and overhauled the factory as early as 1955.
After Brown-Forman closed the Old Forester Distillery in downtown Louisville in 1979 amid a bourbon sales crisis , the production of this whiskey moved to Shively. Brown-Forman decided at this time to sell Old Forester as a premium brand. In order not to compete with itself, Early Times was no longer made as bourbon. The whiskey was only matured for three years and some of the whiskey was also matured in used barrels. Early Times has since been sold only as Old Style Kentucky Whiskey in its most important market, the US, while a Bourbon variant of Early Times is only produced for export.
The first Woodford Reserve whiskey also came from the Early Times Distillery . After Brown-Forman bought the old Labrot & Graham distillery and extensively restored it, the company resumed its operations there in 1996. Since the whiskey distilled there had to mature for several years, but the distillery had a visitor center and "local" whiskey was to be sold there, Brown-Forman designed a substitute product. 1000 of the best Old Forester barrels distilled in Shively were brought to Labrot & Graham, finalized there and sold under the new name Woodford Reserve. The product was so successful that Brown-Forman kept the brand name after making real Labrot & Graham whiskey, and the product was so successful that the Woodford Reserve Distillery was unable to produce it. Presumably a larger part of the Woodford Reserve still comes from Shively and is only blended with whiskey distilled in Versailles when it is bottled.
In the years after 1996, when a large portion of Heaven Hill's inventory and production facilities burned down, Heaven Hill produced its whiskey at Jim Beam and the Brown-Forman Distillery in Shively.
Remarks
- ^ Gilbert Delos: Les Whiskeys du Monde. Translation from French: Karin-Jutta Hofmann: Whiskey from all over the world. Karl Müller, Erlangen 1998, ISBN 3-86070-442-7 , pp. 145 f. ( Forester ).
- ^ A b c d Brown-Forman Corporation: The Old Forester Distillery aka Early Times Distillery Shively, Kentucky , September 14, 2000.