Royce Neeley, grasp distiller of Sparta, Kentucky’s Neeley Household Distillery, had first seen the itemizing on-line. The 1.34-million-square-foot Stitzel-Weller campus in Shively, inclusive of 15 rickhouses (with capability for almost 330,000 barrels), a bottling line, 1000’s of sq. toes of workplace house, and its distinctive distilled spirit plant code (DSP-KY-16), was up on the market, listed at $34.8 million. However there’s a catch: the distillery constructing itself, which housed the unique nonetheless and whiskey-making tools, isn’t a part of the deal. He absorbed that info and went about his day, forgetting about it till a number of weeks later when he acquired a name from a realtor asking if he wish to purchase Stitzel-Weller.
The reply was a decisive no. “It doesn’t include the IP, so that you don’t get the Stitzel-Weller title, however I’d need the distillery too,” he says. “It’s slightly humorous to promote the distillery and never embrace the precise distillery.” He notes the age of the warehouses which might be on the market, too—they date again to the Thirties, making them slightly below a century previous…a possible headache, even in the perfect of circumstances, as many 100 yr previous rickhouses are in want of some TLC. For the precise purchaser, nonetheless, this may very well be a extra alluring alternative.
The distillery was based in 1935 by spirits distributor W.L. Weller & Sons and A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery, and at its helm had been Arthur P. Stitzel, Alex T. Farnsley, and Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle Sr. Over the course of their stewardship, the three males launched legendary bourbon manufacturers, amongst them W.L. Weller, Outdated Fitzgerald, Insurgent Yell (now often called Insurgent), and Cabin Nonetheless. The whiskeys had been notable for his or her inclusion of wheat, not rye, within the mashbill, a transfer that introduced wheated whiskeys into the limelight. Essentially the most revered of its manufacturers at the moment are scattered throughout completely different possession: Sazerac lays declare to W.L. Weller, Heaven Hill makes Outdated Fitzgerald, and Luxco owns each Insurgent and Cabin Nonetheless.
Stitzel-Weller Distillery itself, in the meantime, has been owned by Diageo (or one in all its forerunner corporations) since 1972. Diageo’s predecessor United Distillers shuttered Stitzel-Weller in 1992, and since then, there was no distilling of consequence. The warehouses can be utilized, and the remainder of it features as a vacationer website greater than the rest. However some funding has been made—Diageo put $2 million into the positioning again in 2014, debuting a brand new customer’s middle, bottling line (which closed earlier this yr), and tiny hybrid nonetheless able to producing as much as two barrels of whiskey per week. And final month, the corporate unveiled Stitzel Reserve, a collection that’s set to highlight archival barrels; a lot of that are at the moment growing older throughout the 15 warehouses that at the moment are in the marketplace.
The place would these barrels go? A Diageo spokesperson factors to an present plan that may shift the vast majority of maturing and warehousing operations from Stitzel-Weller to its different Kentucky services in Shelbyville and Lebanon over the following two to 3 years. Exterior of promoting off “unused parts of the property,” the distillery will stay the identical, in response to the spokesperson, who flags that the customer middle is not going to be altering in any capability.
