Bulleit

The Bulleit Frontier Whiskey story begins in 1987 when Tom Bulleit decided to revive his family's high-rye bourbon recipe. The mash bill was originally devised by his great-great-grandfather, Augustus Bulleit, who distilled whiskey using it between 1830 and 1860. To raise funds for the start-up, Tom Bulleit took out an home equity line on his house and a further loan, totalling $1m. With the money, he approached Ferdie Falk and Bob Baranaskas of Age International, with a view to contracting them to distil his whiskey at their George T. Stagg distillery (now Buffalo Trace). The parties came to an agreement, which included Bulleit acquiring some aged and ready-to-bottle stock from their warehouses.

In order to begin marketing the whiskey, Tom Bulleit founded KenAgra Inc (a contraction of Kentucky Agricultural) in 1989. The bourbon was then bottled and brought to market for the first time in 1991 under the brand name Thoroughbred. He was then confronted with two issue. The first was that sales of the brand were not good, and the second was that George T. Stagg was acquired by Sazerac Company in 1992 and he is required to make a new deal. The company wanted Thoroughbred to be distributed in twenty different states, however this is later reduced to eight. Still struggling to sell it, Bulleit takes a trip to Japan to try and promote the brand, however its lack of premium aesthetic sees it draw almost zero interest.

Needing to drastically rethink, KenAgra hires a marketing and design group called Meridian Communications, who suggest that the whiskey be completely rebranded. It is decided that the new name should be Bulleit, although Thoroughbred was initially retained as the subtitle for the 100 proof version of the bourbon. The first Bulleit bourbon was released in 1995 and were bottled by Sazerac using the same bottle and label shapes as the Elmer T. Lee single barrels.

The new name was immediately effective and caught the eye of the Seagram Company in 1997, which was looking for a new bourbon label to add to its portfolio. They acquired KenAgra that year and moved production of the whiskey to their Four Roses distillery in 1999, coinciding with a significant rebranding which saw the Frontier Whiskey theme and now trademark apothecary style bottle adopted for the first time. The year following that saw a further significant change when Seagram collapsed in December 2000, with its wine and spirits assets carved up between Diageo and Pernod Ricard in 2001. Bulleit was acquired by the former. The Four Roses distillery was bought by the Kirin Group in Japan, however production of Bulleit remained contracted to it until around 2013. Diageo also introduced a rye whiskey in 2011, coincidentally bottled using whiskey made by another former Seagram distillery, MGP in Indiana.

By 2014 it was clear that significant investment was required in order to ensure the continued growth of the label. The first of these investments was in a brand visitor experience which was housed in the former Stitzel-Weller distillery in Shively. The second was that Bulleit required its own distillery in order to take control of its supply chain. Ground was broken that year on the project, which is located in Shelbyville. Work was then completed and distilling commenced in 2017, becoming the production home of both the Bulleit bourbon and rye whiskies. The distillery later also opened to the public as the brand's visitor experience, relieving Stitzel-Weller of the task in 2019.