It’s hard to imagine there are still firsts in an industry as old as the Kentucky bourbon industry, but for Brittany Penny, learning that she was the first-ever African-American woman to become CEO of a Kentucky bourbon brand only motivated her to make sure she isn’t the last. Her story is inspirational: she started her business when her first daughter was a newborn because, as she often recounts, she wasn’t sleeping anyway. The genesis of The IX Bourbon (pronounced “the nine”) is stamped on Kentucky bourbon’s history forever.
“I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and I’ve always loved bourbon,” Penny recounts. “I mean, my dad was a huge bourbon drinker, so I grew up around bourbon. I was that girl during college where my friends would get, like, Cosmos and wine. And I’m 22, and I’m just like, I want to get a Woodford neat. I was always that bourbon girl.”
Several years later, Penny found herself pregnant during the pandemic in 2020. Her husband, James, continued to drink bourbon and she realized that her sense of smell was heightened because of her pregnancy, so she could smell a lot more nuance in her husband’s glass of whiskey than she could before. “I just picked up all these different flavors, and call it delusion or pregnancy brain, I just was like, I want to start my own bourbon company!” she exclaims.
In June of 2021, the Pennys welcomed their first daughter into the world. Shortly thereafter, Brittany Penny got to work on her dream. “I wanted to do something that could build a legacy that could better my family, but also that would fulfill me,” she recounts. “I never really wanted to be a business owner, but I thought this is something I would love to do.”
Penny got to work learning the business side of bourbon, which she says was completely foreign to her at first. She knew what she liked, but she had no idea how to translate that into a business. “I learned a lot,” she says. “It was a lot of new information about the licensing process and the TTB and bottling and certain label sizes and things like that. That was a huge wake-up call for me because I thought that I could just buy barrels, put it in a bottle, and sell it, and that’s it.”
The next big learning curve had to do with the barrel shortage, which impacted even the availability and cost of sourcing matured barrels of whiskey. “Barrels are the key component in bourbon,” she explains. “We couldn’t find anything because of the barrel shortages. And because something goes short, the price of the barrels have gone up.” Then she had to contend with the glass bottle shortage, supply chain hiccups, a cork shortage, and more, just as she was trying to launch her fledgling business.
So I was like, of course, I will come in and try to build this company and we have all these challenges,” she laughs. “But now it’s getting a little bit better. Things are finally getting back to normal, but it took three years.”
Though she has faced challenges in getting her company off the ground, Penny never felt that it was a sign she should give up.
“I feel like nothing in my life has ever been easy,” she says. “Nothing has ever been handed to me. It’s normal to go through challenges and obstacles and hurdles because that’s just how I’ve always been. In fact, if something comes easy to me I question that more because I’m like, wait a minute, what is the catch? I thrive off of challenges. I thrive off of having doors slammed in my face. That just motivates me.”
For the first batch of The IX Bourbon, Penny worked through 16 barrels, first narrowing it down to her top nine picks and finally to her top five. She and her husband chose to blend those five barrels together, making batch one of The IX Bourbon after the birth of their first daughter.
Penny says she was nervous about that first batch because she didn’t get a chance to try it before it was bottled – she had to finish nursing her daughter first. But once it was bottled and on its way to market, she finally had a chance to sample her first masterpiece. “I was anxious, I really wasn’t sleeping, I was just up worrying,” she recalls. “I would wake up from a dead sleep and just be like, ‘Oh my God, what is happening? Oh my God, this is going to fail!’ You know? I was a nervous wreck the whole time until I finally got to taste it. And then I was like, oh, this is great!” Still, after three years, she says she hasn’t reached the point yet where she’s stopped being nervous about her work.
“It’s just that I’m always trying to make it better. Even though it’s good now, I want to make it great. And then once it’s great, I want to make it phenomenal.” The pressure, she says, is amplified by the fact that she’s doing this in Bourbon Country. But there’s also an added pressure point: Penny discovered shortly after launching her brand that she was the first African-American woman CEO of a Kentucky bourbon brand in history – a fact she did not believe at first. “That was very surprising because we’re in Kentucky, right?” she says. “There’s 100-year-old brands, 150-year-old brands, there’s all this rich legacy and history, and I just knew that somebody else rose through the ranks. I just knew that somebody else at these older companies worked their way up and finally got a chance at the C-suite, because it was 2020, right? So I’m like, there’s no way that I could be the first.”
Some friends and colleagues had mentioned to her that they thought she might be the first, and after her initial disbelief she started to do a little research and came up empty. “We all know a Fawn Weaver over at Uncle Nearest,” she says. “There’s been so many people in this industry, I was pretty sure that I’m not the first Black woman, little old me with 1,300 bottles working out of her home. But after doing some Googling and researching and after talking to some media contacts, they all backed up the claim. I am the first. And I take that with great honor and pride. But my goal is, even though I’m the first, I will not be the last.”
The IX has since released batch two of its bourbon and is working on getting batch three out by the spring of 2024. The brand is currently looking for investors to grow – but only those who will align with its goals and values. Most of all, Penny wants to grow a brand that is comforting and hospitable to all those who enjoy it. A decade from now, she’d like to have a visitor experience, nationwide distribution, and to be working toward a distillery of her own, as well as having additional brands in her portfolio.
Learn more about Penny and The IX Bourbon at 2centsinc.com.
