Chris recently shared his visit to Bardstown and the process of picking our very own (very special) barrel of 10 year old Willett.

It's a rare honor that certainly isn't lost on us – and with the arrival of our barrel at the end of this week, we're sharing more from master distiller Drew Kulsveen's visit to us, last month.

Chris and Drew on Fulton St last month 🫶

CHRIS LEON:

Thanks again for having me at the distillery. It was a first for me since I’m a wine guy by trade, and it was a fantastic experience for me and [my friend] Garrett. Willett’s history is unusual—family owned, with the stills only coming back online relatively recently. Can you talk about that and what it meant for you?

DREW KULSVEEN:

For most of my life—31 years—the distillery wasn’t operating. We were still aging and blending sourced whiskey that we’d acquired during the glut. Our family has a long history of distilling, and there have been bumps along the way. My dad had the vision to restore the place long before I came on board in 2004. If I take you to the top of the stillhouse where the beer heater sits, it has a production date of November 1990. So he’d been planning a rebuild for a long time; it just didn’t happen then. He’s a visionary who loves to start projects, but he wasn’t great at finishing them. My sister and I grew up with the mindset that if you start something, you finish it. I joined in 2004; she came a few years later, around 2007, relocating to Kentucky after Katrina. Even before she arrived, I was already pushing to get the distillery rebuilt.

CHRIS:

Prior to that push, you were buying “juice” and depleting old Willett stock?

DREW:

Correct. From 1981 until 2012 we were depleting Willett inventory and buying stock from a lot of the same sources as other independent bottlers—Julian Van Winkle among them. We actually bought more, and from a wider range of sources. We also did a lot of private labeling back then—some very famous brands today came through our facility for services. But we weren’t going to risk the business to rush a rebuild. Dad never wanted to go out of business just to finish the project, so we took our time and got it done without a hard deadline.

CHRIS:

There’s a story you told about the first new-fill barrel.

DREW:

One of the coolest things to me is that our first whiskey put into barrel was on what would’ve been my grandfather’s 103rd birthday. To revive the distillery and fill that first barrel on his day—that felt symbolic. That was January 2012.

CHRIS:

Which means by now you’re approaching 14 years on some of those in-house fills. When someone bottles a ten-year, there’s real rarity there. As a retailer, I’m often skeptical of “manufactured scarcity” in whiskey. But with Willett’s in-house program still comparatively young, these 10-, 11-, even 12-year barrels feel genuinely scarce. Is that fair?

DREW:

I started the Willett Family Estate label in the mid-2000s—2005 or 2006 is when I created the label. Back then people weren’t into whiskey like they are now, and many had never heard of Willett because that brand didn’t exist. Then interest spiked and we couldn’t keep up; we didn’t have the inventory. We took a ten-year hiatus from the market. When we brought it back, we knew we had to do it differently. We’d have to say “no” a lot. What we bottled this year amounts to about 0.005% of our inventory. It’s microscopic. We want the experience to be special, carefully filtered, and focused on our best partners who truly support Willett.

CHRIS:

As a taster, I’ll say it straight: the whiskey is f—ing awesome. I’ve thought about it almost every day since the visit. I even took home a 10-year rye and it disappeared fast. Hearing the timeline helped me understand just how rare those barrels are. Is your approach unusual in the current landscape?

DREW:

Many distilleries—most much larger than we are—can offer abundant single-barrel picks through distributors. Not knocking that at all; they have millions of barrels to work with. We don’t. We want to present the absolute best of what we have.

DREW: If we let everyone who called or emailed come pick a barrel, a lot of whiskey would get out that didn’t meet our mark. This is our family name. If our name is on the label, we’re proud of it and we stand behind it. It needs to be special.

CHRIS: 

When you talk about “standing the family name back up,” are there bars or restaurants you think of as being there early—any in New York?

DREW: 

Jack Rose in D.C. was one of the first. Bill Thomas, who owns Jack Rose, flew to Kentucky with our distributor at the time. I remember taking them to dinner in Louisville. They said, “We’ll get a license, we’ll find a way to bring this into D.C., and we’ll show people how great Willett is.” From there, word spread. Mike Miller at Delilah’s in Chicago has been a supporter and close friend for over twenty years. There were spots in New York as well, though some sadly aren’t around anymore—it’s been a strange few years for the industry. We were talking earlier about Char No. 4 and a few other places we miss. And my friend Rob Morton had a great Lower East Side bar called Idle Hands. Those were all great places.

CHRIS:

I said this when we released our pick: the integrity of the work is impressive, and I’m proud our shop supports what you’re doing.

DREW:

We really appreciate that support. We’re excited for you to get the barrel, and we hope your customers love it as much as we did when we picked it.

Shop Our Willett 10 Year