Boone County Distilling Company, LLC

Boone County Distilling Company is the modern Northern Kentucky operation that revived a brand whose original incarnation was, in 1880, the single largest distillery in Kentucky. The original Petersburg Distillery was founded in 1833 when William Snyder and his brother John bought a Petersburg, Kentucky steam mill in Boone County and converted it to bourbon production. By 1880 it had become the largest distillery in the state, registered as Distillery #8, and was a defining piece of the pre-Prohibition Northern Kentucky bourbon industry. The brand and the original distillery declined through the 1910s and finally shut down completely in 1918, with the last reserves sold off.

The brand sat dormant for 97 years. In 2015, founders Jack Wells and Josh Quinn re-established the company in Independence, Kentucky — not at the original Petersburg site, but a few miles east in a purpose-built modern distillery. The "8" in the brand's logo is a direct reference to the original Petersburg Distillery's Registered Distillery #8 designation, and the tagline "Made by Ghosts" honors the pre-Prohibition Northern Kentucky distilling heritage that Boone County is consciously reviving.

Michael Wells serves as Master Distiller, overseeing the production of bourbon, rye, and a small range of finished whiskeys. The distillery uses a single column still for the bulk of production and produces a small range of barrel-finished and limited-release expressions on top of the core lineup. Capacity is modest — the operation is genuinely small-batch by Kentucky standards — which keeps releases scarce and most of the brand's product sold close to home in Northern Kentucky and the Cincinnati metro area across the river.

The Independence visitor experience runs on the B-Line, the Northern Kentucky's regional tourism trail that connects distilleries, breweries, and bars in the Newport-Covington-Independence corridor. Boone County tours include the production floor, the small on-site warehouse, and a tasting room that includes the full Boone County range plus the occasional limited-release single-barrel. The location makes it a natural anchor for a Northern Kentucky day-trip that combines New Riff in Newport, Second Sight in Ludlow, and Boone County itself — three distinct craft operations within 30 minutes of each other, all distinctly Northern Kentucky in identity and well outside the Bardstown-Frankfort gravity well.