Heaven Hill Distilleries, INC.

The Bernheim Distillery in Louisville is the actual production engine of the Heaven Hill empire — the place where Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, Larceny, Old Fitzgerald, Henry McKenna, Rittenhouse Rye, Heaven Hill bourbon, and several dozen other Heaven Hill-owned and contract brands are physically distilled. The site holds DSP-KY-1, the first Kentucky Distilled Spirits Permit issued after Prohibition, a designation Heaven Hill acquired when it purchased the facility from Diageo in 1999 for $107 million. The Bernheim history is its own story. Isaac Wolfe Bernheim, a German-Jewish immigrant who founded the I.W. Harper bourbon brand, built the original Bernheim distillery in Louisville in 1888. The brand passed through United Distillers and then Diageo before the 1999 sale to Heaven Hill, which gave the Shapira family a continuous-operation production site to replace the Bardstown stillhouse that had been destroyed in the catastrophic November 7, 1996 fire. Production at Bernheim is column-still bourbon and rye on a massive scale — exact capacity isn't disclosed but industry estimates put the site among the top three Kentucky producers by total proof gallons. The Louisville visitor experience for Heaven Hill brands lives mostly downtown rather than at Bernheim itself: the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience on Whisky Row (528 W Main St, opened 2013) operates as the brand's main public-facing showcase, with an artisanal still on-site that produces a small-batch experience product d…