A Quiet Walk That Saved the Bourbon Industry

There’s a place in Kentucky where history doesn’t just sit still—it breathes. Where a quiet path winds past towering warehouses and a lone, unassuming building that doesn’t seem to belong. One evening, after the crowds had gone and the noise had faded, a solitary walk across those grounds uncovered something far more powerful than architecture or aging barrels. It uncovered a story—one that had been hiding in plain sight for decades, waiting for the right moment to be heard.

This episode pulls you into a forgotten chapter of bourbon’s past, when the industry stood on the brink of collapse and the future looked anything but certain. Long before the world chased rare bottles and premium pours, one simple habit—almost invisible in its time—set something extraordinary in motion. What began as a personal preference, a quiet routine repeated without fanfare, would unknowingly become the spark that reignited an entire industry.

At the heart of it all is a moment so small it could’ve easily been missed… a walk, a choice, a single barrel. But from that moment came a ripple effect that crossed decades and oceans, reshaping bourbon into what it is today. The question is—how did something so ordinary become so powerful? And why did it take nearly half a century for the world to finally understand what had been there all along? 

Feel free to email your thoughts about the episode or the show in general at thebourbonprincipal.com. I would love to hear from you!

Thank you for listening to Bourbon: Legends from the Trail, where history meets flavor and every bottle has a story to tell.  Cheers to the stores and legends behind the Spirit! Please leave a rating and review as it will help me plan future episodes.

Transcript

As one walks the grounds, your eyes struggle to take it all in at once. The sheer scale of the property unfolds slowly, brick by brick, path by path. Near the heart of it all rises the tall, commanding water tower, crowned with the unmistakable Buffalo Trace name and brand—a silent beacon visible from nearly anywhere on the campus.

Because Buffalo Trace is open seven days a week, there is rarely a moment when the grounds aren’t alive. Thousands of guests move through the property each day, some gathering for tours, others making a beeline for the gift shop, all hoping to leave with a souvenir—and maybe…. if luck is on their side, a remarkable bottle of bourbon.

You see, Buffalo Trace is not only one of the most awe-inspiring, historic distilleries in Kentucky, it is also one of the largest. When you first pull into the parking lot, it feels as though you’ve arrived at the whole experience. But what is in front of you is deceiving. Because what you are seeing at first glance is only about half the story. The distillery itself sits tucked back behind the hill, out of sight, just waiting to reveal itself as you walk from the parking lot to the Visitor Center.

That hill hiding the distillery is crowned with a winding walking path, weaving through manicured gardens and historic buildings that have stood watch over the grounds for decades. It’s a place where time seems to slow, where the past lingers just beneath the surface.

One particular evening, a couple of years ago, I brought a small group to Buffalo Trace for a special after-hours event. The distillery had gone quiet. No tourists wandered the grounds. No employees moved from building to building. Just my group—and a few staff members who met my group and soon disappeared inside for a private meeting, leaving me alone to wander the property.

I took the path along the hill and moved through the gardens, stopping to marvel at the old buildings. I continued on and passed the edges of the stillhouse, grain bins, and other mechanical buildings.. Soon, I found myself walking by the gift shop, the bottling house, and the 8-millionth barrel resting inside the world’s smallest federally bonded warehouse. Next I  passed the legendary Warehouse C, one of EH Taylor’s first buildings he constructed when he bought the distillery in the late 1800’s, and the one that famously lost part of its roof to a tornado years ago. I found that I was also standing next to the massive water tower.

As I moved on, and walked past the water tower,  I found myself standing beside a building unlike any other on the property. At first glance, it looked out of place—almost misplaced—especially among the towering brick warehouses that resemble giant sentinels guarding their precious liquid within. This building was smaller. Shorter. Quieter.

And even stranger.

Its orangy-red exterior wasn’t brick at all. It was metal. The only metal warehouse on the entire site. It looked less like it had been built there and more like it had been dropped there, adopted into a family of structures it didn’t quite resemble.

If it weren’t for the sign on the outside that read “Warehouse H,” you’d never guess what it held. You might assume it was filled with odds and ends. Storage. Forgotten things. 

But I knew this unassuming building's secret from days gone by, and as I stood there, my imagination began to drift. The building began to whisper its legend. Time began to peel back. And suddenly, I wasn’t standing there alone anymore.

I envisioned an average looking older gentleman, the distillery president from decades past walking down to this very building. In his mind, he was simply there to choose a great barrel of bourbon from the center of the warehouse for his guests as he had done on many occasions —entertaining local leaders from the state capital, dignitaries from around the world, friends gathered to drink and talk late into the night. 

What he didn’t know—what he couldn’t have known—was that he wasn’t just picking a barrel.

He was creating a process that would become LEGEND.

A legend that would help save the bourbon industry some 40 years later.

A legend that would ignite a bourbon boom unlike anything the world had ever seen.

Intro 

Most everyone referred to him by the nickname, The Colonel. His story began in 1881, born on a tobacco farm a few miles from the distillery that would one day orbit around him. Across the street from that distillery stood his grandfather’s home—an estate known as The Beeches, named for the towering beech trees that shaded the property and watched over generations of whiskey men coming and going.

At sixteen years old, the Colonel took his first paying job at the distillery. His title was unremarkable—office boy. But those who watched him noticed something immediately. He didn’t just work. He studied. He enrolled in typing and shorthand classes. He learned how the place breathed. How it moved. How decisions were made.

By the age of thirty-one, the Colonel was no longer watching from the edges. He was promoted to plant manager of what was then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery. Production. Distillation. Bottling. Every drop flowed under his watch.

Then in 1921, through tenacious hard work, he became president.

Just two years into Prohibition. When most distilleries fell silent, The Colonel refused to let his distillery wither away.

Known as a shrewd and aggressive businessman, he secured one of the rarest permissions in American whiskey history—one of just six licenses that allowed a distillery to continue selling stored bourbon for medicinal use. While others had to shut their doors, his barrels still mattered.

As Prohibition staggered along, the distilleries were nearing an end to their stock, and the Colonel moved again. The government was planning to allow limited production to restart, but it would take an investment the current owners didn’t want to risk. So the Colonel convinced them to sell. The distillery was purchased by Schenley Distillers Corporation—a company positioned, prepared, and waiting.

And the Colonel didn’t stop there.

He, alongside other distillery leaders, pressured the government not just to restart production, but to end Prohibition entirely. And in 1933, the Great Experiment collapsed as the Volstead act was repealed

And his distillery—already loaded, already ready—came roaring back to life.

The Colonel, wanting to keep a keen eye on all that he had worked so hard to establish, built a home on the hill overlooking the distillery and the river below. He called it Stony Point. 

Progress continued and the next building in line was another Warehouse. In need of one sooner rather than later, he decided to build one on a smaller scale. .

Brick would have taken too long. Metal would be the choice as it could be ready now.

As all the warehouses for bourbon were labeled with a letter, it would be labeled with the next letter in line.

Warehouse H.

For fifty-five years, the Colonel ran this distillery through the good and bad. The Colonel weathered his distillery Through Prohibition. Through the Great Depression. Through the catastrophic flood of 1937. Through two World Wars. By the early 1950’s, his distillery was a well oiled machine and he was ready to step aside…leaving it to a man that he had been mentoring, a man named Orville Schupp.

As the Colonel stepped aside, Schenley did something unheard of

They renamed the distillery in his honor.

And still… his influence lingered.

As time moved on. Tastes changed.

By the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s, bourbon faced a threat no one had seen coming—America’s youth. In protest of war, politics, and tradition itself, they turned away from brown spirits. They didn’t want what their fathers drank.

They wanted clear spirits.

Vodka.

Gin.

Tequila.

And bourbon began its downfall

In the 1970s, 57 distilleries operated in America. By the late ’80s, only 12 remained—and most of them were bleeding money.

As time had moved through these tumultuous decades, the Colonels distillery—now called Ancient Age—had been run by Orville Schupp’s former protege when Orville had decided to retire. His name was Elmer T. Lee.

Elmer was born and grew up near Frankfort. He enrolled at the University of Kentucky, but after Pearl Harbor, he left to join the Air Force, serving as a radar bombardier in the Pacific theater, flying missions over Japan from Guam. When the war ended, he came home, and went back to school to finish his degree in chemical engineering. During the breaks from school, he took on part-time work at the distillery where he met Orville Schupp.  

One day after Elmer graduated, Orville Schupp introduced him to the Colonel and said this is the young man I was telling you about.

The Colonel looked up and said,

“Son, we’re not hiring any hands today.”

Elmer walked out.

Deflated.

Schupp caught him and told him to come back Monday.

Elmer did. Little did either of them know, but this small act of defying the Colonel, would one day save the industry.

And over the years, Elmer rose with multiple promotions—until the day he was running the entire operation just as the Colonel had done years before.

But as time moved on, and as we mentioned, bourbon lost its favor with the American youth. For Elmer, he was tired…Ready to walk off into retirement.  Even as overseas markets showed promise, America had moved on and Elmer was ready to do the same.

With a high regard for Elmer and his passion for the distillery and knowledge of its history, the current owners, a company called Age International, asked him for one last thing.

They wanted him to create something similar to what was selling extremely well in America.  The single malt Scotch whiskey. It was a premium brand.  Makers Mark was attempting and having success appealing to the world as a premium brand with their statement “its tastes expensive…and is”. America had never had a truly premium bourbon whiskey.

As Elmer searched for an answer, his mind went backward.

To a man he once watched walk the grounds with quiet certainty. To the man who had told him, “son, we are not hiring any hands today”

He looked up the hill to Stony Point, and down to the small metal warehouse, Warehouse H.

He remembered how the Colonel would walk down to Warehouse H, always to the center cut—the place he said produced the best whiskey. He called them the “honey barrels”.

He would choose one barrel.

From Warehouse H.

Every time.

And that’s when Elmer had his idea…. and pitched it to the owners. For many years, many barrels were dumped together and then bottled.  But now, they would change the script.

They would Bottle single barrels.

From Warehouse H. Just like the Colonel

Elmer knew he had the name. He would name it after the Colonel. He knew he had the barrels. And more importantly, He had the story.

But Elmer knew that this bourbon needed to look the part.

If this bourbon was going to live in the highest tier—if it was going to stand shoulder to shoulder with single malt Scotch—it couldn’t look like anything else on the shelf.

And that’s where the next gamble began.

Creating an entirely new bottle mold would mean tens of thousands of dollars in development and testing. In an industry already bleeding, that kind of risk could sink the whole idea before it ever reached glass.

So the distillery turned to the D’Addario Design Company.

Instead of starting from nothing, they looked backward. They selected a bottle shape that already existed—a grenade-shaped design previously used by Glenmore Distilleries and the American Distilling Company for brands like Kentucky Tavern and Bourbon Supreme.

Familiar… but forgotten. Reclaimed.

Now the bottle needed a stopper. A screw cap wouldn’t do. Not for something meant to feel special. Elevated. And that’s when a quiet suggestion changed everything.

D’Addario’s wife recalled a wine stopper she owned—one topped with a horse. Simple. Elegant. And unmistakably Kentucky. A nod to the state’s most enduring symbol.

The idea stuck. Next they added scripted lettering to the label and attached a refined tag.

Finally they wrapped the bottle in a mesh sleeve.

Suddenly, the bourbon looked expensive.

But looking the part wasn’t enough.

Because if you’re asking people—people who had abandoned bourbon for years—to spend real money on a brown spirit again, you had to give them something more.

So they pushed it one step further. They didn’t just put a horse on the stopper. They put a jockey on its back. They celebrated Kentucky’s true pride—horse racing. Motion. Competition. Legacy.

And then came the final stroke of brilliance.

They made the stoppers different. Each jockey and horse frozen in a unique pose as it begins and finishes the race.  Each pose with a different letter at the base of the horse, next to its hoof.. Each letter spelling out the name…

Buy one bottle… and you weren’t done.

You were just getting started. You felt compelled to finish the set. 

What began as a final request before retirement became something else entirely. A strategy. A resurrection. A Hail Mary.

What Elmer and the others had created was …The world’s first mass-produced, marketed single-barrel bourbon.

Born from honey barrels.

Pulled from a quiet metal warehouse.

Named for a man once known only as The Colonel.

The man who had been doing this all along…

The man who unknowingly invented a process…

The man whose quiet preference would one day save an industry…

His name ….. was Colonel Albert Bacon Blanton.

And so, in 1984, Blanton’s was born.

But it was not as an instant savior.

Back home, bourbon’s decline continued. Shelves thinned. Distilleries closed. The American drinker kept turning away. Yet halfway around the world, something unexpected was happening.

In Japan—where for years distillers had modeled their craft after Scotch—palates began to change. Drinkers were growing weary of malted whiskey. When bottles of Blanton’s arrived, something stirred. The depth. The richness. The singular character of a single barrel.

A thirst for bourbon returned—first quietly, then unmistakably.

Suntory, Japan’s premier whiskey house, took notice and became a willing partner with Age International. Almost overnight, overseas sales surged. What struggled at home was suddenly thriving abroad.

The success didn’t go unnoticed.

The owners of the distillery soon returned to the man who thought his story was finished. Elmer T. Lee had already retired, but they asked him for one more act. One more bourbon. This time, they wanted to name it after him.

Elmer agreed.

Before long, Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel Bourbon hit the overseas market—and once again, the response was overwhelming.

Others began to pay attention.

At Jim Beam, Booker Noe—grandson of Jim Beam himself and president of the company—introduced a powerful, barrel-strength bourbon bearing his own name. While not a true single barrel, it was crafted from only a handful of barrels.

A new category was born.

Small batch.

The ripple spread.

Behind the scenes, ownership shifted. Age International eventually parted ways with Suntory, forming a new partnership with another Japanese distributor, the Takara Shuzo Company. A few years later, Takara acquired all of Age International’s brands, as Age International itself was sold to a New Orleans-based company called Sazerac.

Today, Buffalo Trace produces a number of bourbons—Blanton’s, Elmer T. Lee, Rock Hill Farms, and others—for Takara Shuzo’s Age International portfolio.

Names changed. Contracts shifted. Ownership moved from hand to hand.

But the truth remained.

Blanton’s—with its collectible horse-and-jockey stoppers—did more than succeed. It pulled bourbon back from the edge of extinction and launched it into a global renaissance, helping turn it into the largest-selling spirit in the world.

And to think…

It all started with a quiet walk down to a warehouse.

With one man they called the Colonel.

Choosing a single barrel.

Not for profit.

Not for legacy.

Just the best bourbon he could find…

for family and friends.

Resources:

1. Warehouse H: The Story of Bloanton's Bourbon: America's Most Influential Whiskey by Dominic Gugliemi. (Boyle and Dalton 2023)

2. Our Story: Blantonsbourbon.com

3. The History and Ownership of Blanton's Bourbon by Wooden Cork..July 19, 2024

4. More than a Horse Stopper: The Revolutionary History of Blanton's Bourbon by Richard Hawley in Whiskey Wash, October 29, 2025.