The Woodford Reserve Distillery

Woodford Reserve sits on the oldest continuously operating bourbon distillery site in Kentucky — distillation began on this Versailles, Kentucky property in 1812 under Elijah Pepper, and the limestone main building dates to 1838. The site is a National Historic Landmark (designated May 15, 2000), one of only a handful of bourbon distilleries to hold that status, recognized for its well-preserved 19th-century distillery architecture and its role in shaping the modern bourbon industry.

James C. Crow worked the site in the mid-1800s as a Scottish chemist-distiller, and his sour-mash fermentation and pot-still distillation protocols essentially codified what we now call the standard Kentucky bourbon process. After Oscar Pepper's death in 1867, his son James E. Pepper inherited the property, and in 1878 the Belgian immigrant Leopold Labrot and James Graham acquired it — running the operation as Labrot & Graham (with a Prohibition interruption) until Brown-Forman purchased it in 1941. The site went dormant in the late 1960s and sat under farm ownership until Brown-Forman repurchased and refurbished it in 1993. The Woodford Reserve brand launched from the rebuilt distillery in 1996, and the site was officially renamed Woodford Reserve Distillery in 2004.

The production setup is unusual for Kentucky: Woodford Reserve runs triple distillation in three copper pot stills (most Kentucky bourbon is column-distilled), then blends the pot-still spirit with column-distilled bourbon produced at Brown-Forman's Shively facility. Mash bill: 72% corn, 18% rye, 10% malted barley. Aging happens in the historic stone rickhouses on-site, where the natural limestone foundations help moderate temperature swings across Kentucky's seasonal extremes.

Chris Morris served as master distiller from 2003 until 2023, when Elizabeth McCall — a Brown-Forman veteran since 2009 — was named to the role with Morris becoming Master Distiller Emeritus. The product range now spans the flagship Distiller's Select, the Double Oaked finished release, and the Master's Collection limited annual experiments. The visitor experience is among the most polished in Kentucky: guided tours through the stillhouse and rickhouses, a chef-driven on-site restaurant, and one of the most photogenic settings in Woodford County.