ELIZABETHTOWN, Ky. (WDRB) -- The bourbon boom is coming to Elizabethtown.
Whiskey House of Kentucky, a $110 million distillery founded by three veterans of Bardstown Bourbon Co., is on track to begin production in July. It's rising on a 176-acre campus in an industrial park off U.S. Highway 62 just southwest of Elizabethtown's city center.
The Kentucky Bourbon Trail shows only one other distillery in Hardin County: the family-owned Boundary Oak Distillery in Bardstown.
Many new distilleries have popped up around Kentucky during the bourbon resurgence, but Whiskey House stands out because of its business model.
The company is dedicated to making "custom whiskey" for multinational corporate distillers, smaller "craft" distillers and so-called non-distilling producers who have a brand but no whiskey-making capabilities of their own.
That means you'll never see "Whiskey House" bourbon on a store shelf. Instead, every drop will be bottled and sold under someone else's brand.
David Mandell, co-founder and CEO of Whiskey House of Kentucky, on the roof of the $110 million distillery under construction in Elizabethtown, Ky. on April 16, 2024.
"We established this because this is what we love to do," said David Mandell, Whiskey House of Kentucky's CEO, in an interview with WDRB News on Tuesday. "Whiskey House provides long-term partnerships for our customers; they know that we're going to be their production partner for the future."
Mandell, who previously led Bardstown Bourbon Co., founded Whiskey House in 2022 along with Bardstown Bourbon veterans John Hargrove and Daniel Linde. Bardstown Bourbon, which started in 2014, was sold to Pritzker Private Capital for an undisclosed price in 2022.
Unlike most distilleries, Whiskey House will not offer public tours — part of its strategy to keep the focus on its customers, Mandell said.
He said it will be "the most advanced distillery in the country" with tools like automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
"We collect data from every point of the production process. We're able to analyze it using AI and start looking at things in distilling that nobody has looked at before because we haven't collected that level of data," Mandell said. "… We have several thousand sensors in the distillery."
Mandell said this is only the first phase of a planned $350 million investment in the distillery over 10 years. About 90% of the distillery's capacity in the first five years is spoken for, he said, though he declined to name specific customers.
Whiskey House will start with about 58 employees. While no open jobs were posted as of Tuesday afternoon, Mandell said they'll need to hire about 40 people starting in "the next couple of weeks" as the distillery gets closer to opening. Here's a link to their website and to their LinkedIn page for open jobs.
