Hartfield & Co. Brought Bourbon Back To Bourbon County

A Kentucky Craft Distillery That Makes, Not Sources, Its Whiskey

By Richard Thomas

Bourbon whiskey is widely believed to have received its name from late 18th Century New Orleans. Back then, the Big Easy was arguably the most important port in North America, sitting as it did where the Mississippi River flowed the Gulf of Mexico. Farmers making whiskey on the Kentucky frontier shipped it down the Ohio, into the Mississippi and then onto New Orleans. In those days, 34 counties in eastern Kentucky were known as Bourbon County, Virginia, and the place name stuck.

County borders were redrawn over time, Bourbon County went from being a huge frontier colony of Virginia to an exurb of Lexington, Kentucky, and whiskey-making continued there right up until the enactment of Prohibition in 1919. Only a handful of the Kentucky Bourbon industry’s distilleries survived Prohibition, and none of them were in Bourbon County. So it was until 2014, when Hartfield & Co. opened its doors on Main Street in the county seat of Paris.

Originally founded by Andrew and Larissa Buchanan as The Gentleman, they were forced to change their name to Hartfield & Co. early on by a trademark dispute. They have also been consistently bedeviled by Google Maps and certain GPS systems telling drivers that they are actually in nearby Millersburg. However, when I caught up with Andrew earlier this month, they had just moved from from Main Street to a much larger space not far away. The new facility was very much a work in progress, but with an expansion underway things were looking up.

Bourbon, Paris Style
Numerous micro-distilleries are sprouting up in Kentucky, but most are following the time-tested new distillery model in offering a mix of unaged spirits and sourced whiskeys. Hartfield & Co. is one of the few that has a made-in-house Bourbon available on their shelves.

Andrew Buchanan managed this by going the small barrel route, putting his Bourbon in five gallon barrels for 4 1/2 months. Many have disdained small barrel whiskeys, and justifiably so in some instances, as plenty of small distillers tried to follow the existing, big distiller blueprint while taking a short cut on aging. Buchanan, coming from a marketing background and with no prior experience in distillation, broke with that mold in two important ways.

First, he developed a high malt mashbill of 62% corn, 19% rye and 19% malt. In most Bourbons malt is used strictly to provide enzymes for converting grain starch to sugar, Buchanan uses malt as a fully fledged flavoring element. Second, having upped the malt in the mash, he distills to a lower than usual 115 to 120 proof, so as to retain more of that grain flavor. His new make then goes straight from the still and into the cask, without being cut. They also bottle their new make as a white whiskey (100 proof) and sell rum aged in their used Bourbon barrels.

The New Digs
Several years ago, Paris was trying to revive as a picturesque county seat town by turning its Main Street into an antiques district. The effort was a success, because while some of those antiques stores have since been replaced by restaurants and cafes. Hartfield & Co.’s original address had the virtues of drawing in pedestrian visitors on weekends and the charms of a Main Street brick storefront, but lacked space.

The new distillery is just a few blocks away, in the Farm & Seed Company Building. Built in 1911, the building has seen it’s share of changes over the years, and at one point was an indoor car lot. Two solid virtues are sturdy construction and a heavy-lifting elevator. A facility that can support tons of grain and move cars will be able to handle moving and storing barrels, large or small. When I stopped in, Andrew was still hooking up water lines to his batch stills; a month later (and on the day this article goes live, December 2nd), the in-house bar made possible by a recent change in Kentucky law will hold its grand opening.

Hartfield & Co. conducts free, basic tours lasting 15 to 30 minutes Monday through Saturday, whenever they are open (i.e. regular business hours). A more in-depth tour, also free but done by reservation at 4 and 6 pm on Sundays, is done by Andrew himself on Sundays.