Hartfield & Co.

Hartfield & Co. is the Paris, Kentucky distillery that holds an unusual claim: the first new distillery to open in Bourbon County since the end of Prohibition in 1933 — a remarkable gap considering that Bourbon County is the geographic source of the bourbon name itself. Founded in 2014 by Andrew Buchanan, a Bourbon County native who left a career in marketing to build a distillery on his hometown's main street, Hartfield & Co. occupies a small storefront at 718 Main Street in downtown Paris, roughly 20 minutes northeast of Lexington.

The operation is intentionally tiny. Hartfield & Co. is widely cited as the smallest licensed bourbon distillery in Kentucky by production volume, with all distillation handled on a single small pot still in the back room of the Main Street storefront. Production runs at a few hundred barrels per year — a fraction of what a single Heaven Hill rickhouse holds — and the distillery's bottling, labeling, and on-site sales are all handled by Buchanan and a small team. The visitor experience and the production are essentially the same room, separated by a half-wall, which makes the Paris stop one of the most accessible "watch the distiller work" experiences in any state.

The product range covers Hartfield & Co. Kentucky Straight Bourbon (the flagship, aged in 25-gallon barrels for accelerated wood interaction at small scale), Hartfield & Co. Single Barrel releases, Bourbon County Bourbon (a Bourbon-County-only sourced expression), and a rotating range of finished spirits and seasonal releases. The use of smaller-than-standard barrels is the technical accommodation to scale — small barrels surface a higher wood-to-spirit ratio and let young bourbon develop more depth than standard 53-gallon aging would in the same timeframe.

Paris itself sits in the heart of Bourbon County, an hour's drive from the major Kentucky Bourbon Trail stops to the south and west, which gives Hartfield & Co. a natural pairing role for visitors building a wider Northern Kentucky / Bluegrass region tour that also takes in Castle & Key, Buffalo Trace, Woodford Reserve, and the upcoming projects clustered around the historic Pepper site in Lexington. The Main Street storefront is also five minutes from downtown Paris's small but well-developed restaurant scene, making Hartfield & Co. an easy half-day stop that puts you back in the car with a bottle in hand and a clear sense of what a one-distiller Kentucky operation actually looks like.