Wild Turkey Distillery

The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails says James P. Ripy built his Old Hickory Spring Distillery there in 1891.⁹ Its oldest bourbon warehouses, A and B, were built in 1894 and 1902.⁷ In 1905 the sons of T.B. Ripy opened the Ripy Brothers Distillery, a name the site kept until 1949, with a nineteen-year break for Prohibition.^3,6,9 After Prohibition, the Ripy family rebuilt the distillery and made bourbon again.^3,6,9 The Ripys sold whiskey to wholesalers, including Austin Nichols, a New York company.^1,6,9 The story goes that the Wild Turkey name came from a 1940 hunt where Austin Nichols executive Thomas McCarthy shared bourbon from company stocks.^1,6,9

In 1949 the Ripys sold the distillery to Robert and Alvin Gould, who made their J. T. S. Brown Bourbon there.^6,7,9 Jimmy Russell started work on 10 September 1954, when, he recalls, the distillery was called Anderson County Distilling.^1,9,10 He learned from master distiller Bill Hughes, worked many jobs, and took over as master distiller in 1967.^1,5,10 Austin Nichols, which had bottled Wild Turkey from bought whiskey, much of it made here, bought the distillery in 1971 or 1972; sources differ.^6,9 The Oxford Companion says it renamed the plant the Boulevard Distillery, while Wikipedia says it already had that name and became the Wild Turkey Distillery.

Campari Group bought the distillery and the Wild Turkey brand from Pernod Ricard in 2009.^6,7,8 In 2011 it opened a $50 million distillery where the old bottling plant stood, more than doubling what the site could make.^6,7,15 The original distilling plant was torn down in 2010 and 2011.^6,7,15 On 10 September 2013, Campari opened a $43 million bottling plant at the distillery, bringing bottling back from sites in Indiana and, later, Arkansas.^6,15,16 Jimmy's son Eddie Russell, who joined as a relief operator in 1981, was named master distiller beside his father in 2015.

Its water comes from the Kentucky River and is filtered through limestone.¹⁴ Cypress fermenting tanks gave way to stainless steel in the early 1990s, and in 2015 there were 24 of them.^13,16 The mash goes into a copper column still, and the spirit is then distilled again.^14,16