Mb Roland Distillery, INC.

MB Roland Distillery is the Pembroke, Kentucky operation widely credited as the first modern Kentucky craft distillery to operate as fully "grain to glass" — sourcing local grain, distilling, aging, and bottling entirely on a single rural site rather than buying sourced whiskey from major producers. Founded in 2009 by husband-and-wife team Paul and Merry Beth (Roland) Tomaszewski, the distillery sits on the grounds of a former Amish dairy farm in Christian County, near the Kentucky-Tennessee border roughly 70 miles northwest of Nashville and an hour south of Bowling Green.

The "MB Roland" name combines Merry Beth's first name with her maiden name Roland, and the operation has remained genuinely family-run since opening — Paul, Merry Beth, and a small team handle distillation, aging, bottling, and on-site sales without outside contract production. The signature commitment to local sourcing runs through every release: each MB Roland bourbon and whiskey uses local Kentucky white corn (sourced from Christian County farms), and the distillery has never produced a single bottle of sourced whiskey under its own label — every bottle of MB Roland has been distilled by MB Roland on the Pembroke site.

The product range is unusually broad for an operation this small, covering moonshine (the high-volume side of the business, in over a dozen flavors including peach, blackberry, apple pie, and the cult-favorite Coffee Black Dog), malt whiskey, corn whiskey, wheat whiskey, rye whiskey, and bourbon. Most releases are still-and-barrel-proof — no water added after distillation, which keeps the bottling proof high and the grain character forward. The Kentucky Pink Lemonade Moonshine and Kentucky Dark Fired Bourbon (a unique bourbon aged in barrels charred with dark-fired tobacco wood from local farms) are the most distinctly local-to-Pembroke releases on the shelf.

The Pembroke visitor experience runs at the rural, slow-pace end of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail spectrum. Tours are small, often led by Paul or Merry Beth directly, and include the distillation floor, the small on-site rickhouse, and a tasting room that goes through the full range of moonshines, whiskeys, and bourbons. The site is also one of the few stops on the Trail with regular live-music programming, particularly during the warm-weather months when the property's outdoor stage hosts weekly bluegrass and country shows. It's the visit that rewards driving an hour off the main bourbon-tourism arteries.