When three partners announced plans to rehab and reopen the legendary Old Taylor Distillery Co. in Millville, Kentucky, they believed they could do it by late 2015.
Well, not the whole thing—the multibuilding campus is massive—rather a boutique distillery on the property that once was the most lavishly appointed whiskey distillery America had ever seen.
Turns out that even those modest aims were ambitious. The distillery, some said, was in post-apocalyptic condition, a mere shadow of its original grandeur. Opened by Col. E.H. Taylor in 1887 and operated by National Distillers from 1935 to 1975, The Old Taylor Distillery Company lay idle for four decades, and nature was reclaiming the site with a vengeance. Water maples were growing inside office buildings and flower gardens were so densely covered by overgrowth that reclamation crews didn’t discover their concrete sidewalks and fountains until bulldozers cleared the mini-jungle. A four-story rickhouse the length of two football fields was so heavily cloaked in vines that some visitors weren’t aware it was there.
“Yes, 2015 was a little ambitious, wasn’t it?” said Marianne Barnes, with a laugh. The master distiller and partner at what is now named Castle & Key Distillery, knew she’d accepted a project of epic proportions we first talked with her a few years back about shortly after she left her master taster role at Brown-Forman to take the job. “But I also saw it as a really cool challenge. Not many people get a chance to be involved in something like this.”
As the reclamation began and more of Taylor’s masterpiece was revealed, the partners knew a small distillery just wouldn’t do. So they refocused on a larger, though not complete, restoration, and pushed the opening date back to 2016.
Then to 2017. And now, 2018.
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“I think we’ve stopped setting dates for now,” said Barnes, acknowledging the delays with a weary but admirable joviality. “Wes (Murray) and Will (Arvin) want to do this right. They see it as too special to not do it well.”
The partners won’t say what’s being spent to rehab Castle & Key, but it’s clearly in the millions of dollars. Much of that money, provided by Murray, a hedge fund manager, and Arvin, a former lawyer, has been poured into whiskey production, which began last November. The original Taylor still, a behemoth 72-inch diameter copper column, remains only for historic purposes . Two new stills—a 24-inch diameter column for whiskey, and a 17-inch stainless column for gin—are producing spirits at least four days a week. New fermenters were recently installed to boost production to seven days a week.
