Kentucky Bourbon Trail
program to promote Kentucky Bourbon industry
The Kentucky Bourbon Trail, sometimes informally referred to as "the Bourbon Trail", is a program sponsored by the Kentucky Distillers' Association (KDA) to promote the Bourbon whiskey industry in Kentucky. The KDA has registered the phrase "Kentucky Bourbon Trail" as a protected trademark.
History
The KDA launched the Kentucky Bourbon Trail program in 1999. At the time, it included seven of the eight distilleries in the region. In 2008, an eighth distillery, the Barton 1792 Distillery, joined the Trail program. However, the distillery was purchased by the Sazerac Company the following year, and Sazerac withdrew both the Barton 1792 Distillery and the Buffalo Trace Distillery from the KDA at the beginning of 2010. The two Sazerac distilleries continue to host public tours, and a Sazerac spokesperson stated they still feel they are "very much a part of the Bourbon Trail", but Sazerac wishes to promote its distilleries independent of the KDA.
In August 2012, the Town Branch Distillery was added to the trail, bringing the number of distilleries back to seven. The Heaven Hill Evan Williams distillery in Louisville was added in May 2013, expanding the primary tour program to include eight destinations. In 2014, The Bulleit Experience at Stitzel-Weller Distillery joined the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, raising the number to nine destinations. In June 2018, Old Forester opened an urban distillery in downtown Louisville and became a member of the Bourbon Trail.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kentucky Bourbon Trail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.