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 produce…