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Stoli outlines plans for $150m distillery in Kentucky
Vodka maker Stoli has broken ground on its new US$150 million whisky distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, where it will begin its expansion into the American whiskey category.
Called Kentucky Owl Park, the 420-acre complex will be built at the Haydon Materials Quarry, formerly Cedar Creek quarry, along John Rowan Boulevard in Bardstown, near another new distillery from the Bardstown Bourbon Co.
The project is expected to cost in the region of $150 million, with the company receiving approval for up to $2 million in tax incentives through the Kentucky Business Investment program, and also up to $1.2 million in tax incentives through the Kentucky Enterprise Initiative.
It will feature a visitors centre, a cooperage, barrel warehouses, a bottling centre, a restaurant and other facilities and is expected to open in 2020, creating 77 full-time jobs.
The plans will give Stoli Group, which is the distribution and marketing arm for Luxembourg-based SPI Group, its first bourbon distillery for its newly founded American Whiskey Division, which includes the Kentucky Owl brand which it acquired in January.
Kentucky Owl was founded in 1879 by pharmacist Charles Mortimer Dedman, but ceased production in 1916 when government agents, during Prohibition, confiscated some 250,000 gallons of Dedman’s stock by barge up the river to be warehoused under lock and key in Kentucky’s capital of Frankfort.
Soon after a suspicious fire destroyed the warehouse where Kentucky Owl was being stored, with speculation that Al Capone or another crime boss, cut a deal for the contents of the facility before it burned.
The brand was revived in 2008 by Dixon Dedman, and acquired by Stoli Group in January, with Dedman remaining as master blender.
Work on the phase one of the Kentucky Owl development will begin early next year, officials said, with the distillery scheduled to open in 2020.
Stoli has said that it plans to create or acquire additional whiskeys and bourbons to be produced at the distillery in the future.