Willett Distillery
Bardstown, Kentucky
The Willetts landed in America in the late 1600s and made their way to Kentucky by 1792. The family’s distilling tradition began a few generations later, after the Civil War. The current, post-Prohibition Willett Distillery “was started on my great-grandfather’s hog and cattle farm,” said Britt Chavanne, the distillery’s vice president of administration. “To this day, we’re on the fifth generation, and we’re still 100 percent independently family owned and operated.”
The distillery is set in the midst of Kentucky’s bluegrass and horse farms, and tours take visitors through the whole distilling operation, except for bottling. The distillery building is the original, and though it’s been gutted and refurbished, the operation remains small scale and traditional.
“We use the same grains, the same distilling methods, the same aging methods,” Chavanne said. “We’re still using the scale that dates back to when my grandfather was here.”
It’s not just the process that’s traditional; so is the recipe. “We’re currently using six different mash bills; four of them are bourbon whiskeys, and two of them are rye whiskeys,” Chavanne said. “The majority of what we’re using is original.”
Visitors taste their choice of two of the distillery’s products at the end of their tour. Willett handles groups but caps each tour at a maximum of 25 people at once, allowing an intimate experience. Chavanne recommends using the distillery’s online reservation system to schedule tours.
www.kentuckybourbonwhiskey.com
Great Lakes Distillery
Milwaukee
Sometimes you can get a really great idea while sitting in a bar. That’s how Great Lakes Distillery came about. Guy Rehorst, the owner, “went out to a bar and could see all these cool local craft beers on tap, but the liquor bottles were all the same,” said Valerie Tergerson, their tasting room manager. That brainstorm inspired the creation of craft spirits in Wisconsin’s first microdistillery.
Plan your group’s visit on a weekday, and you’ll be able to see the active production process in the small distillery. There are just two distillers and some part-time bottlers who are mostly friends and bartenders, and everything is hand operated.
Visitors get a taste of seven liquors as part of the experience.
“Gin is what I like to highlight as one of our specialties,” Tergerson said. “It’s different — it’s not like a London dry style. We use sweet basil and Wisconsin ginseng, and we toned down the juniper. We’ve turned a lot of people on to our gin.”
Visitors can also try one of the distillery’s “experiments,” which is produced in batches as small as a single barrel.
Great Lakes Distillery is in Milwaukee’s up-and-coming industrial Walker’s Point neighborhood. There are three breweries within walking distance, as well as the Harley-Davidson museum and some of Milwaukee’s hottest restaurants.
Firefly Vodka
Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina
“I grew up drinking sweet tea like it was milk.”
Scott Newitt, the Firefly guy — he’s the Firefly Vodka president but doesn’t like titles — attributes the idea for the company’s sweet-tea-flavored vodka to childhood inspiration. The oldest distillery in South Carolina, Firefly Vodka was the first company to come out with a sweet-tea-flavored vodka.
It was practically a no-brainer: North America’s only tea plantation is five miles from the distillery. The vodka is locally produced, too; the cane sugar, which isn’t grown in South Carolina, comes from Newitt’s home state of Louisiana.
Firefly is sold all over the country, but “what we make by hand on Wadmalaw we only sell to South Carolina and the Bahamas,” Newitt said, “and we have a lot in our tasting room you can only buy in our tasting room.” The brand produces a full range of distilled products, from their muscadine vodka to moonshine, bourbon, whiskey and rum.
Visitors get a virtual tour of the distillery via videos in the tasting room. The site’s still a farm, and there are barnyard animals for the kids to pet. Visitors can also take a self-guided tour at the tea plantation and visit the winery for more tasting and a view of the fermentation equipment.
Groups can enjoy some distinctive South Carolina scenery on their drive out to the distillery.
“We’re the dictionary picture of the low country: tidal creeks and live oaks and moss,” Newitt said. The ride there from downtown Charleston also passes by the oldest tree east of the Mississippi, Angel Oak, a 500-year-old oak that covers an acre.
