J. Mattingly 1845 Distillery Celebrates Grand Opening – Offers Visitors Custom Bourbon Blending Experience

Location, Location, Location

One of the things that makes this distillery unique is its location. The distillery and visitor center is located at 20 Reilly Road just a few hundred yards from Kentucky’s most visited distillery Buffalo Trace Distillery. Just the Buffalo Trace overflow traffic ought to keep the tourism flowing steady at this new spot.

Build Your Own Barrel Pick

The other thing that makes J. Mattingly 1845 unique is the visitor experience. The distillery offers two visitor experiences. The first is a standard tasting that includes a sampling of up to six different J. Mattingly 1845 bourbon releases. The other provides visitors with the VIP experience where they get to play master blender for the day as a part of the J. Mattingly 1845 Blending Experience.

J. Mattingly 1845 sources matured bourbon whiskey and then finishes it using their proprietary ‘double staved’ finishing process. They take the matured bourbon and drop in various combinations of used staves that get placed inside the bourbon barrels for a certain period of time creating a unique texture, richness and depth to the finished bourbon. If you are familiar with the Maker’s Mark Private Select program where they finish fully matured Maker’s by placing a variety of wood staves inside a barrel for a few weeks to make up a unique blend it is kind of like that. Visitors get to try four quarter ounce pours from four different Kentucky bourbon, wheated bourbon or rye whiskey finished with the double staved process. Then based on their own personal favorites they can blend their own bottle of bourbon using a percentage of whiskey from each of the four barrels. From there, visitors choose from three different bottles, a unique label, a closure, then they top off the bottle with a choice of red, green, silver or gold wax. After all that they get to name their new creation and take it home all in the same day.

The Mattingly family whiskey ancestry dates back to 1845 when John Graves Mattingly established Kentucky Registered Distiller No. 2, second only to Heaven Hill’s Elijah Craig Registered Distillery No. 1. The Mattingly name is so ingrained with distilling there have been at least nine distilleries in Kentucky in which a Mattingly had a hand in developing. The family also has connections to some of the most prolific bourbon barons in the industry, including George Garvin Brown of Brown Forman, the Willett family, and the Samuels family, with Margie Mattingly Samuels creating the iconic Maker’s Mark packaging, label, bottle shape and famous red wax.