RD-1 Spirits Launches Bid To Put Lexington On Your Bourbon Trail

By Richard Thomas

Nowadays, a map of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail looks like a skewed quadralateral set onto Central Kentucky. While there are distilleries nestled deep in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky; in the remote river country of the western part of the state; and in bucolic and isolated college towns like Danville; most of the action is found in one of four corners: Louisville, Bardstown, Lexington and Northern Kentucky (i.e. near Cincinnati). Yet most of the tourist attention in terms of where people stay, dine out and indulge not whiskey-related activities is centered firmly on Louisville and Bardstown.

While Northern Kentucky is fairly new as a proper corner of the trail and home to none of the Kentucky Majors (the state’s big, legacy distillers), the way people overlook Lexington has always been peculiar. It’s a mid-sized city, the horse capital of the world and the corner that hosts Four Roses, Wild Turkey and Buffalo Trace, plus Woodford Reserve and several prominent newcomers like Town Branch and Castle & Key. With a C.V. like that, Lexington should be a natural base for part or all of a holiday on the Bourbon Trail, but statistics reveal that the city itself receives less than 8% of all Bourbon Trail traffic.

Last week saw the ribbon cutting for the new $5 million RD-1 Spirits visitor center and distillery, which is intended to bring in 30,000 guests annually and hopefully break the dam on bringing those Bourbon Trail travelers to Lexington. RD-1 presently hosts the company tasting room, bar, gift shop and blending lab, but will host a future craft-scale distillery. Although not yet operational, there is already a small hybrid still and 500-gallon pot still on the property, along with a fermenter. The bar is open to all visitors, not just tour patrons.

RD-1 Spirits is located in The Commons, an ongoing redevelopment of a property that was once home to a sprawling tobacco warehouse complex. The new bourbon attraction is a relatively early entrant to the development, with much of the construction waiting for groundbreaking, but they aren’t the first major attraction to open there: that honor belongs to Battle Axes, an indoor entertainment center. The popular Distillery District on Manchester Street, just a mile from The Commons, began even smaller than this with Barrel House Distillery in 2006.

RD-1 Spirits is named after the old Ashland Distillery, which in 1865 became what is technically the first Federally registered whiskey distillery of the modern era. If that date seems late in the history of American Whiskey, President Thomas Jefferson abolished taxes on whiskey, and the Federal government stayed out of the whiskey industry until President Abraham Lincoln reintroduced taxes on spirits in 1862 as a measure to fund the Civil War. The distillery was later owned by one William Tarr, whose name was used for the Wm. Tarr Bourbon brand launched by RD-1.

The new facility is three times the size of the old RD-1 tasting room, which was well-located in the aforementioned Distillery District. Although RD-1’s previous facility was on a ground floor, street-facing corner of the old James E. Pepper rickhouse, that location was about half a mile down the road from the site of the original Ashland/William Tarr Distillery. The only surviving building of that plant is its Warehouse #1, which is now the Manchester Music Hall.