Wilderness Trail Distillery

Wilderness Trail Distillery is the oldest legal distillery in historic Danville, Kentucky. We are a premium craft distillery that produces 100% of our high quality spirits, such as Bourbon, Rye Whiskey, Vodka and a unique rum from Kentucky sorghum molasses. We specialize in making unique spirits from local ingredients through a strong application of the science behind making spirits. Our foundation of producing premium spirits comes from applying the best practices of working with over 150 distilleries around the world. Our founders Shane Baker and Pat Heist are fermentation experts with over 20 years' experience in the production of alcohol and some of the best brands on the market today. Wilderness Trail Distillery's products are very unique and handcrafted with precision focusing solely on a unique sweet mash process and producing consistent great tasting award winning spirits. We start with sourcing our corn & wheat grain's grown less than 3 miles from us on the Caverndale Farm, grown by third generation farmers on some of the original land settlements in this area back in the late 1700's. We bring those grains to the distillery weekly so we can grind the freshest grains with our hammer-mill. We source our barley malt from malteurop and also grind it to our specification here at the distillery. Uniquely we use a clean steam boiler for our cook as we want the highest quality water. We cook our grains using the infusion-mashing process, which is starting out with 194F water and slowly adding our grains (corn - wheat - malt) at different temperatures without ever applying heat again. After cook and once to fermentation temperature, we ferment using a unique sweet mash process with our proprietary yeast strain before distilling in our custom made copper pot still and twin columns. We produce award winning Vodka and rum, but 95% of our production is our bourbon (corn, wheat, Barley malt), we age our bourbon until it is ready in 53 gallon, new oak barrels and we bottle all of our spirits by hand with every attention to detail. As we say "We are not interested in making a lot of product, just the best tasting product that can be made." We also specialize in training and educational courses from micro to macro spirit production. We have a full analytical laboratory and offer trouble shooting and optimization services.