Prelims

Steve Coomes (Freelance Writer, USA)
Kim Huston (President, Nelson County Economic Development Agency, USA)
Mike Mangeot (Former Bardstown Tourism Director, USA)

The Rebirth of Bourbon: Building a Tourism Economy in Small-Town, USA

ISBN: 978-1-83867-714-5, eISBN: 978-1-83867-711-4

Publication date: 4 September 2020

Citation

Coomes, S., Huston, K. and Mangeot, M. (2020), "Prelims", The Rebirth of Bourbon: Building a Tourism Economy in Small-Town, USA (Economics of Vice), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. i-xv. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-711-420201013

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:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020 Emerald Publishing Limited


Half Title

The Rebirth of Bourbon

Title Page

Economics of Vice

The Rebirth of Bourbon: Building a Tourism Economy in Small-Town, USA

Steve Coomes

Freelance Writer, USA

Kim Huston

President, Nelson County Economic Development Agency, USA

Mike Mangeot

Former Bardstown Tourism Director, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2020

Copyright © 2020 Emerald Publishing Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-83867-714-5 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-711-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-713-8 (Epub)

Contents

Forewords
The Business of Bourbon is Booming vii
Kim Huston
Bardstown Didn’t Call Itself “The Bourbon Capital of the World®” for Nothing xi
Mike Mangeot
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. The Town that Bourbon Built 15
2. The Bourbon Renaissance 39
3. Cultivating and Managing Bourbon Tourism 59
4. The Economics of Bourbon 85
5. Bourbon’s Celebrity Culture 101
6. The Future of Bourbon Tourism 113
7. Conclusion 139
Afterword
The Living Case Study of The Bourbon Capital of the World® 149
About the Authors 155
Index 157

Forewords

The Business of Bourbon is Booming

Kim Huston, President, Nelson County Economic Development Agency

If you were to ask me 10 years ago how hard would it be to locate a new bourbon distillery to Bardstown, I would have grimaced and answered honestly, “pretty difficult.” If you were to ask me that same question today my answer would be, “surprisingly not too hard,” and I’d have good stats to back that up.

In the past 10 years, four new distilleries have located in Nelson County, and each of the four existing distilleries have spent millions of dollars on expansion projects resulting in hundreds of new and good-paying jobs.

Why Bardstown? What is the secret formula for enticing new distilleries to locate here? There are many theories and even better stories, but sometimes it’s as easy as involving our local wildlife.

A few years ago, David Bratcher, President and COO of LUXCO (Owner of Lux Row Distillery) came to visit a site on which the company might build a distillery. I had just the place in mind: a beautiful 70-plus acre farm in the city limits and, as an extra bonus, halfway between Jim Beam and Makers Mark Distilleries. Its long, pin oak tree-lined driveway makes you feel as though you’re headed to your country estate. On this day, I got lucky: a deer was standing off to the right of the driveway as if staged for a movie. The timing could not have been more perfect; it was like, “Cue the deer,” and there it was grazing in the grass without a care in the world. It was as at home in that setting as we hoped Mr Bratcher would feel. As we pulled onto the farm we were welcomed by black lab named Joker, and a set of three flashy peacocks. Talk about making an entrance. Apparently, all that wildlife made the site visit memorable as LUXCO chairman and CEO, Donn Lux, purchased the property and built a gorgeous state-of-the-art distillery on that picturesque vista. The peacocks came with the sale.

What I have come to realize is that when you integrate the business of world-renowned bourbon making into your county’s economic development portfolio, things change for the better. We all know that as a spirit, it eases conversation and conviviality. And as an industry, bourbon and its allure have proven attractive to other businesses. Many new companies love to tout that they have located their operations in the “Bourbon Capital of the World®,” which has made my job of recruiting them a bit more fun.

With fully one-third of all Kentucky-made bourbon being produced in Nelson County, it makes sense that other distilleries want to be in the epicenter of all things bourbon. Bardstown has the infrastructure, water and land, supporting industries and the shared experience of generations of distilling legends all here.

When completely unrelated businesses look at what’s happening with the bourbon industry, they realize Bardstown must have developed a great formula for being a location where you can be successful in any business and play on a national stage. In the past 12 years, we’ve seen eight domestic manufacturers and four international manufacturers build multimillion-dollar facilities here, which is significant for a town our size. We were also excited to successfully recruit three new flag hotels to Bardstown in 2019. We’ve happily welcomed them into our corporate family and are thankful for the jobs and taxes they will provide.

Achieving such growth in our business sector was no walk in the park. On August 5, 2015, I felt like I got taken to the woodshed by Bill Samuels, Jr chairman emeritus at Maker’s Mark and an icon in the bourbon industry. Bill, a good friend who was born and raised in Bardstown but now lives near Louisville, told me and two other community leaders that we basically needed to step up our game because other cities were. (Actually, his words were more colorful than that as you will read in the book.) He made us realize we had become complacent in believing our self-proclaimed Bourbon Capital title could not be taken away. Yet Louisville, our big-city neighbor, with its unlimited resources, was doing just that with the development of its Whiskey Row and various bourbon experiences. It was after Bill’s professional scolding that we recognized the need to take a strategic approach to improving our bourbon tourism position. No one distillery, restaurant or hotel could accomplish that on its own, rather a massive collaborative effort by most every significant entity in the community was needed to pull it off.

What resulted was the formation of the Bourbon Capital Community Alliance (BCCA), whose members created a vision that addressed bourbon tourism actively, not passively. For too long Bardstownians had watched visitors come and go, entertained them while they were here, but never considered as a group how to keep visitors here longer and give them more reasons to return.

Part of the BCCA’s mission statement is this: “… to facilitate, foster and endow projects and programs that enhance experiences, knowledge and awareness for visitors and residents of the Bourbon Capital Area.” To that aim, BCCA members said, Bardstown needed to increase marketing, enrich the city’s brand equity, court spirits and travel writers, build brand awareness through social media campaigns, and consistently train workers at every level of the hospitality community to create elevated bourbon-related experiences. In short that meant all of us needed to up our game and work overtime to do that.

Part of that vision came from visits I and several Bardstown colleagues made to some Napa Valley communities in the California Wine Country. As Bardstown is today amid the bourbon boom, wine country towns underwent a similar shift from quiet, agriculture-centric communities to tourism destinations when its wines gained notoriety on a global stage. Towns like Healdsburg, Yountville and Sonoma once were just easy-going small towns with affordable places to live and do business. But beginning in the mid-1980s, as tourists flocked to wineries there, upscale restaurants, specialty stores and boutique hotels followed and changed Napa Valley into an internationally well-known destination.

Subsequently, there’s been a lot of discussion about the “Napa-fication of Bardstown,” which is a clever way of implying how our historic city will inevitably change due to the soaring popularity and production of bourbon. But as you’ll discover by reading this book, the differences between Napa Valley and Central Kentucky are so plentiful that it’s unlikely the Napa nickname will stick as Bardstown transforms into its own new identity over the coming years.

Make no mistake: Our goal, and even dream, is to be like Napa Valley by playing on the international tourism stage and by leveraging Kentucky bourbon as our primary vehicle. And if the last 10 years are any indication of what is to come, it’ll be a distinctly Bardstown experience, one as authentic as the bourbons made here, as hospitable as the people who call it home, and as worthy of multiple visits as it’s always been.

Enjoy reading about our bourbon boom and the cast of characters who helped to make it all happen and make plans to come and experience it for yourself.

Bardstown Didn’t Call itself “the Bourbon Capital of the World®” for Nothing

Mike Mangeot, Former Executive Director of Bardstown Nelson County Tourism and Convention Commission

I’ve been in the tourism business for nearly all my life – far longer than I was paid for it, for sure. When I was a kid, my father was President and CEO of the Kentucky Derby Festival, the largest civic celebration in the United States, for 17 years. That made me an indentured servant whenever its many events needed another set of hands and feet, which seemed like constantly for Mangeot children. I didn’t always find that fun as a kid, but like most adults with similar experiences, I look back on them fondly as well as formative.

My résumé certainly reflects the results of that exposure: multiple state and national posts and boards for marketing, tourism and economic development positions, the details of which I’ll mercifully not list. So, what drew me to this position? The answer is simple. Bardstown has what every tourist wants: authenticity. It also has what every marketer needs: a unique selling proposition – the Bourbon Capital of the World®.

But what surprised me the most was that we weren’t leading with bourbon in our marketing efforts. In 2012, Rand McNally dubbed this “The Most Beautiful Small Town in America,” which became the primary tag line for all of our marketing and advertising. While this designation might lead one to imagine visits here are living Norman Rockwell paintings, and believe me there’s plenty of that, there are beautiful small towns all over the world. While it’s an asset, it doesn’t separate us from our competition. Bardstown didn’t name itself the Bourbon Capital of the World® just for marketing purposes. It did so because no other place really could. Here’s why.

Bardstown has a rich history in bourbon making, which we will explore later in the book, but so do many other Kentucky towns. What really sets Bardstown apart is that so many of the families that have helped create the bourbon industry – Beams, Samuels, Willetts, Shapiras, Dants and Noes – all continue to have homes and/or ties to this community. Our history and heritage aren’t fabricated. If you stop by one of our local restaurants or walk down the street for a cup of coffee, there is a pretty good chance you’ll see one of our master distillers.

True story: When I started my position, I hired an advertising agency out of Louisville. I invited the team to Bardstown for a tour and as we were walking through downtown, we passed a young man on his way to get his wife a cup of coffee from the local coffee shop. It was Freddie Noe, eighth generation distiller from Jim Beam. Following our tour, we ended up at a new restaurant that a local distillery just opened. Sitting in the restaurant at the time were master distillers from Heaven Hill, Bardstown Bourbon Company and Willett Distillery. I looked at the advertising team and said, “You’ve been here half a day and have seen four master distillers. Tell me, where else you can do that?” It wasn’t a set-up, it’s what happens here every day. In a word, it’s authentic.

That visit led to our new, nationally recognized and award-winning advertising campaign, “Bourbon Comes from Bardstown.” We’re a small town with a small marketing budget in a highly competitive industry. We needed to make a bold statement and replant the flag that if you want the original and authentic bourbon experience, you had to visit the Bourbon Capital of the World®. The essence of the campaign is this: While bourbon can be made anywhere in the United States, when you visit and see how ingrained this industry is in our town, meet the people who make it, walk through the rickhouses and literally smell the bourbon in the air, there’s no mistaking bourbon comes from Bardstown.

Let’s discuss bourbon production for just a second: In 2019, Kentucky distillers filled 2.1 million barrels of bourbon, crushing the old record set back in the 1960s. When that high mark was registered, bourbon was many things, but none terribly sexy. It was a product, it was a job, a retail shelf filler, a source of tax revenue, and a source of income for fortunate advertising firms. But nobody came to Bardstown – or anywhere in Kentucky for that matter – to see bourbon made, bottled or barreled. In the minds of most bourbon consumers of that day, bourbon came from a liquor store. And if they bought it, why tell them otherwise?

But only a decade would pass before bourbon sales nosedived. Spirits drinkers were falling for and buying loads of vodka, gin and tequila while bourbon, the quintessential American spirit, languished.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that appreciation for bourbon returned, along with an appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into making it. Not surprisingly, sales began creeping northward. And as bourbon’s future brightened, a curious thing happened: People started to visit Kentucky distilleries to see not just bourbon made – but their bourbon made. Suddenly people weren’t just fond of bourbon, in general, they were fans of bourbon specifically. Gradually, these enthusiasts turned into a tourism director’s dream: talking advertisements who told others who told others and others still about how cool it was to visit Heaven Hill Distillery, Barton 1792 Distillery and Willet Distillery in Bardstown.

Fast-forward to 2018, when roughly 1.7 million visits were logged at Kentucky distilleries large and small. That was great news for distillery owners, and it presented many opportunities for hoteliers, restaurateurs or craft cocktail bar owners. But while other Kentucky cities like Louisville and Lexington have all the above in spades, Bardstown needs more of all three.

This amazing small town of 13,000 people, Kentucky’s second-oldest city, is in reaction mode to a pretty desirable problem. Hundreds of thousands of American whiskey fans are coming here annually for distillery tours, and they want to eat here, drink here and stay here. As of this writing, Bardstown has three hotels under construction and its Airbnb community has grown so quickly that city officials had to set new regulations for managed growth. Additional restaurants and bars that will provide more elevated eating and drinking experiences are in the works, yet some days it seems they can’t open fast enough.

While Bardstown is thrilled with the countless opportunities bourbon tourism has placed in our hands, we also want visitors to sample other options on our tourism menu. Headliners like My Old Kentucky Home State Park, The Stephen Foster Story musical, My Old Kentucky Dinner Train, a nationally recognized Civil War Museum, Kentucky Railway Museum, along with a wide range of retail shopping options have been visitor mainstays for decades. Frankly, we think they’re every bit as cool as bourbon. But make no mistake, what’s driving our tourism economy right now is bourbon.

Come see us soon in the Bourbon Capital of the World® and find out why we say, “Bourbon Comes from Bardstown”!*

*

Shortly after the original manuscript for this book was submitted, Mike Mangeot resigned his post as Executive Director of Bardstown Nelson County Tourism and Convention Commission to become Commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Tourism in January 2020.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kentucky Utilities and Louisville Gas & Electric for their support of this book.