Two weeks ago, we told you about the partial collapse of Warehouse 30 at the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky. On July 4, not surprisingly, the rest of it came down. The photographs and videos are certainly dramatic, approximately 18,000 barrels of whiskey, each one holding 53 gallons and weighing 500 pounds, in a massive pile, with pieces of the roof and other debris scattered about.
No one was injured in either collapse.
The story is all over social media and many people are blowing it way out of proportion. Obviously, it is a bad accident, but it doesn’t imperil Sazerac, the distillery’s owner, nor will it have a significant impact on the industry as a whole. It is a drop in the bucket. There are currently 6,657,063 barrels of whiskey aging in Kentucky. The barrels affected in this incident represent about 1/3 of 1% of that total, and that’s just in Kentucky. There are a few million more aging in Tennessee, Indiana, and other states.
Editor’s Note: This article appears courtesy of its author.
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