by You may remember seeing pictures and video of the collapsed rickhouse at Barton’s 1792 Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky. Initially it was only half of the rickhouse and then, before it could be safely shored up, the other half collapsed. However, all that good bourbon is not lost.
The distillery has begun the process of recovering as many intact barrels as possible, repairing the leaking ones, and discarding the ones that can’t be saved. According to gobourbon.com, the Sazerac subsidiary is sorting the barrels into three categories:
- Barrels that don’t need repair are recorded and removed from the pile to continue aging.
- Barrels that are leaky or damaged are moved to a coopering area to be repaired.
- Barrels that are beyond repair are dumped into a holding tank and discarded.
The distillery has not released any information on how much has been saved.
The following two videos show the recovery process. The first video was provided by Barton’s 1792 Distillery.
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There is no word whether or not the distillery is going to release the bourbon from the collapsed rickhouse, Warehouse 30, as a special release similar to what their sister company Buffalo Trace did after a tornado took the roof off of Warehouse C. That release, E. H. Taylor Warehouse C Tornado Surviving bourbon, now goes for over $1,000 per bottle on the secondary market.
At least they managed to save some of it. Good on them!
As much as I like 1792, I don't think I'd pay much of a premium for something from this problem.
Absolutely, positively, never, never, ever, $1000 for a bottle.
This is probably going to come across as strange, but while bourbon doesn't interest me at all, the story of how a company deals with this kind of disaster is very interesting.
The extent of my knowledge was that the word (and surname) cooper were associated with working on barrels.