Heaven Hill Distilleries, INC.

Heaven Hill is the largest independent family-owned and operated producer of distilled spirits in the United States — and the company quietly responsible for more of the bourbon on American back-bars than any single name on a label suggests. Evan Williams. Elijah Craig. Larceny. Old Fitzgerald. Henry McKenna. Rittenhouse Rye. Heaven Hill itself. All of it produced at the Bernheim Distillery in Louisville (acquired from Diageo in 1999, registered as DSP-KY-1) and aged, bottled, and shipped from the original Bardstown campus on what locals call Heaven Hill Springs. The company was founded in 1935 by the five Shapira brothers — Ed, Gary, George, David, and Mose — alongside investor Joseph L. Beam (the same Beam family). The Shapira brothers eventually bought out the other partners, and their descendants still run it. The Bardstown property is the brand's spiritual home: a Bourbon Heritage Center that opened in 2004 on the old distillery grounds, a tasting room shaped like a barrel, walking tours through working rickhouses, and a small museum tracking American bourbon from the 1700s forward. The standard Heaven Hill mash bill — 78% corn, 10% rye, 12% malted barley — runs through the Bernheim facility's column stills, into #3-char barrels (the wood is exposed to flame for exactly 35 seconds), and into the warehouses for aging that ranges from 4 years on Heaven Hill Old Style up to 18 years on the highest Henry McKenna single-barrel releases. Bottles are chill filtered through ch…