Alltech's Lexington Brewing & Distilling Co.

Alltech's Lexington Brewing & Distilling Company is the Lexington, Kentucky operation that holds the distinction of being the first new distillery to open in Lexington since Prohibition — and one of the only Kentucky bourbon producers built on top of a craft brewery rather than from the bourbon side. The combined facility was founded in 1999 as Alltech's craft brewery by Dr. Pearse Lyons, an Irish biochemist who founded the global animal-nutrition company Alltech in 1980 and built it into a multibillion-dollar agriculture-science operation while developing a parallel passion for whiskey and beer.

The brewery side produced Kentucky Ale and the bourbon-barrel-aged Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale starting in 1999 — the latter still considered one of the founding products of the modern bourbon-barrel-aged-beer category and a Great American Beer Festival award winner several times over. Distillation came online in 2008 under the Town Branch name, taken from the historic stream that flows through downtown Lexington and was once the geographic spine of the city's pre-Prohibition distillery district. The Town Branch Bourbon mash bill uses a higher-than-standard percentage of malted barley, reflecting Lyons' brewing heritage, and the production setup uses double pot-still distillation rather than the column-still standard.

The product range now includes Town Branch Bourbon (small-batch, 80 proof), Town Branch Rye (100% rye whiskey), Town Branch Malt (American single malt), the Pearse Lyons Reserve Irish-style triple-distilled, and the Bluegrass Sundown coffee-bourbon liqueur. Dr. Pearse Lyons died in 2018, and the family-owned business has remained under the Lyons family's control with Mark Lyons (Pearse's son) leading the spirits side.

The Lexington visitor experience is one of the most efficient stops on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail because the brewery, distillery, and visitor center are all on a single downtown campus at 401 Cross Street, walking distance from downtown Lexington restaurants and hotels. Tours move through both the beer and bourbon production lines, and the on-site tasting room offers full-range flights of both categories — the only Kentucky Bourbon Trail stop where a single ticket covers both craft beer and bourbon. The site is also a natural pairing with Glenns Creek and Castle & Key for visitors building a Lexington-Frankfort-Versailles tour cluster.