The Willett Distillery

Willett is the Bardstown distillery you visit when you've already done the big tours and want to see what a hands-on family operation actually looks like at scale. The pot stills are visible from the visitor center. The Kulsveen family — three generations of them — works the property. The Willett Pot Still Reserve bottle, with its distinctive decorative decanter shaped like a copper pot still, is the most-photographed Kentucky bourbon bottle on Instagram for a reason.

The Willett story has two acts. Act one: construction of the Willett Distilling Company began in spring 1936, headed by A. Lambert Willett and his sons — most prominently A.L. "Thompson" Willett. The first batch was distilled March 17, 1937: 300 bushels, about 30 barrels. The original company ran successfully through the post-war bourbon boom, then collapsed during the bourbon bust of the 1970s and shuttered distillation entirely. Act two: the Kulsveen family acquired the company on July 1, 1984, renamed it Kentucky Bourbon Distillers (KBD), and spent the next 28 years operating as an independent bottler — sourcing aged whiskey from other producers and bottling under the Willett, Noah's Mill, Rowan's Creek, and Pure Kentucky brands. In 2012, distillation resumed on-site for the first time in nearly three decades, and the operating name reverted to Willett.

E.A. "Drew" Kulsveen serves as Master Distiller. His sister Kristin Martha-Britt "Britt" Kulsveen became President and Chief Whiskey Officer in 2018. Their father, Even G. Kulsveen — the man who acquired the company in 1984 — received the Parker Beam Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, formally recognized as "a beloved icon who patiently resurrected one of the state's most historic distilleries."

The current product range is split between bottling-era releases (still using sourced and finished aged whiskey, including the long-running Rowan's Creek and Noah's Mill) and the post-2012 Willett-distilled releases (the Family Estate single-barrel program, the small-batch Pot Still Reserve, and the increasingly hard-to-find Willett 4-year ryes that have become secondary-market obsessions). The tour is intimate, ungated, and one of the few places in Bardstown where you can talk to the people who actually distilled what you're drinking.