Casey Jones Distillery

Casey Jones Distillery is the Hopkinsville, Kentucky operation built on one of the most direct moonshining-to-legal-distilling lineage stories in Kentucky. The distillery is named for the founder's grandfather, Casey Jones — not the railroad engineer of folk-song fame, but the Prohibition-era Western Kentucky moonshine master who, from the 1930s through the 1960s, designed and hand-built an estimated 150 portable "coffin" stills (named for their squared, transportable design) and was imprisoned twice for still-building. Casey's still designs were renowned among Western Kentucky moonshiners for superior flavor and efficiency, and the family preserved one of his final stills as a template.

In 2014, Casey Jones's grandson Arlon "AJ" Jones and his wife Peg Hays opened Casey Jones Distillery on the Jones family homestead just outside Hopkinsville — 5.5 miles northwest of town in Christian County, on the property where AJ grew up around the moonshining tradition. The still currently in use at the distillery was built using AJ's grandfather's preserved final still as the design template — making Casey Jones one of the few legal Kentucky distilleries running production on stills explicitly modeled after pre-legalization moonshining equipment.

The product range honors the family's moonshine heritage while expanding into the legal-aged spirits market that Casey himself never had the chance to participate in. The core lineup runs unaged white whiskey and flavored moonshines (the high-volume products that funded the operation's first years), several straight bourbon expressions (aged in standard new charred oak), and limited-release single-barrel and small-batch bottlings. The 10th Anniversary Founder's Blend, released in late 2024 to mark the distillery's first decade of legal production, is the most ambitious bottling in the brand's history.

The Hopkinsville visitor experience leans hard on the family-story side. Casey Jones's preserved final still is on display in the visitor center as a historical artifact and as the direct production-equipment template — a touchpoint that gives the tour an immediacy most Kentucky distillery histories can't match. The site's rural Western Kentucky location (closer to Nashville than to Lexington) makes it part of the Stateline Whiskey Tour rather than the central Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and pairing with MB Roland Distillery a few miles away gives the region's craft-distilling scene a distinct identity separate from the Bardstown gravity well.