Old Pogue

Old Pogue Distillery is a family-owned operation that's been distilling, closing, and reopening on the same hillside in Maysville, Kentucky for nearly 150 years. The original H.E. Pogue Distillery was founded in 1876 by Henry Edgar Pogue, an Irish immigrant who took over an earlier 1840s distillery site at the top of what's now called Pogue Hill, overlooking the Ohio River. The H.E. Pogue brand survived through three generations of the Pogue family — Henry Edgar Pogue II, then H.E. Pogue III — before Prohibition shut it down in 1920. Henry Pogue III was tragically killed in an industrial accident at the closed distillery in 1919, and the family never restarted distillation after Repeal in 1933.

The brand sat dormant for 70 years. In 2004, fifth-generation descendants John, Peter, and Paul Pogue revived the operation and rebuilt a small distillery on the same Maysville hilltop, beginning distillation in 2012 after years of selling sourced bourbon under the Old Pogue Master's Select label. The current operation is genuinely small — among the smallest licensed distilleries in Kentucky — with all production handled by family members and a small core team. It's also one of the few Kentucky distilleries where the people who own the brand are also the people who run the still, the warehouse, and the visitor program.

The flagship Old Pogue Master's Select Kentucky Straight Bourbon is bottled at 91 proof, aged a minimum of 6 years, with a mash bill that uses a notably higher rye content than the Kentucky norm — closer to a high-rye recipe than a standard bourbon. The Limestone Landing Single Malt Rye is the second core release, a 100% malted rye whiskey aged in new charred oak that sits stylistically closer to a craft American single-malt than anything in the Kentucky bourbon mainstream. Annual single-barrel releases and limited Master Distiller's selections round out the available range.

The Maysville hilltop visitor experience is one of the most personal in Kentucky — small groups, often led by a Pogue family member directly, with tours that include the original 19th-century stone office building (preserved on-site) and the rebuilt modern stillhouse. The site sits an hour east of Cincinnati and roughly 90 minutes northeast of Lexington, making it a less-trafficked addition to a Northern Kentucky bourbon tour.