By Richard Thomas Kentucky micro-distillery Boundary Oak’s new location in Radcliff, roughly between Louisville and Elizabethtown, is now open for visitors. Boundary Oak originally opened three years ago, becoming the first legal distillery in Hardin County since Prohibition. They began a transition to a new and larger facility in Radcliff last year. The new facility has yet to begin operations, ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B- Western Kentucky has a fun bit of wordplay: Bourbon County is dry, while their own Christian County is wet. Soaking wet, as it happens. Located on the east side of the Land Between The Lakes, where the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers flow parallel towards the Ohio, this region was once a riverine hotbed of illicit ...

By Richard Thomas Kentucky Mist Moonshine, a micro-distillery based in the coal mining town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, suffered a major blow in its trademark battle with the University of Kentucky (UK) last Thursday. U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves dismissed Kentucky Mist’s lawsuit against UK over the use of the word “Kentucky” on clothing on June 23, ruling that the university had ...

By Richard Thomas Tennessee is not just the Volunteer State, but also America’s second whiskey state. Kentucky’s sister state was one of the survivors of Prohibition and the 1970s whiskey slump, making Jack Daniels, George Dickel and the Lincoln County Process (LCP) fixtures in the story of modern American whiskey. Yet the very fact that for decades it was just ...

By Richard Thomas Moonshine has an almost mythological quality to it. The liquor’s illicit mystique is so embedded in American culture that it’s the stuff of films, songs and television, but surprisingly few Americans (and even fewer foreigners) have ever had a sip of the stuff. The rise of legal moonshine has exposed more people to the juice itself, but ...