At Willett Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, fifth-generation master distiller Drew Kulsveen is making some of the world’s most sought-after whiskeys.
Ask Drew Kulsveen whose bourbon, besides his own, he likes to drink, and he’ll demur. “I don’t want to go on the record,” he says, “or people will start chasing after it.” Kulsveen’s opinion matters that much, because in the world of American whiskey, he’s a bona fide celebrity.
We are in Willett’s limestone-columned distillery watching the contents of a 10,000-gallon fermenter roil. Gorging on the sugars in a soup of grains and water, yeast sends foaming ripples across the oatmeal-colored liquid. It is transforming the mash into beer that later will be rendered into alcohol in two huge stills: a gnome-shaped copper pot still, antique-looking but new; and a stainless-steel column still with a colorful past. Manufactured for the old Kentucky brand Waterfill and Frazier, the still wound up in Mexico during Prohibition, where it was used to make contraband. Drew’s father, Even Kulsveen, bought it for a steal.
The column-still purchase is one chapter in a storied history that has led Drew Kulsveen to this moment. It starts in the 17th century with Cognac-producing ancestors. The Willetts were French Protestants who escaped persecution from the Catholic church by moving to America. They settled in Kentucky, where they got into bourbon making in the late 19th century. Prohibition was a temporary setback. More significant was the blow dealt by vodka when James Bond’s “shaken, not stirred” martini helped vodka top spirits sales by the 1970s. Seen as old-fashioned, bourbon lost popularity. By 1981, Kulsveen’s grandfather had leased his stills to an ethanol producer that then went bankrupt, leaving only ruined equipment behind.
Drew’s father Even took over a few years later. His son joined him in 2004. But it took them until 2012 to start distilling again. In the lull, Willett became a cult NDP, or Non-Distilling Producer.
That’s changed. With the comeback of classic cocktails, demand for bourbon reignited. Today, American whiskey sales top $3 billion annually. But distillers can’t just bottle on demand; whiskey must age. And the overstocks that Willett relied on had dwindled by the time they were able to reboot the stills. “We would have been in a world of hurt if we had not started back up,” says Kulsveen.
He leads me to one of the Willett rickhouses. With six stories of thick, wooden beams illuminated by southern sunlight seeping through small windows, the building holds 6,000 barrels of slowly aging bourbon and rye. Though Kulsveen intends to keep most of it for a decade or more, Willett has already released some of its own distillate in its cask-strength Family Estate bottlings as well as in the affordable Old Bardstown series. They’re also slowly introducing it into their seven or so other brands.
Though the old family recipes are still in use, wheated bourbon, which is smoother and sweeter, drives Willett’s distilling nowadays. There are more updates, too. In terms of distilling, Kulsveen is experimenting with stave curing and different barrel woods. At the new visitor center, overseen by Kulsveen’s wife, Janelle, a bar will open this spring for cocktails, library pours, and small plates. And the gristmill and some cabins have been transformed into guesthouses.
whiskey.com for where to find them.