If you ask any bourbon fan, chances are at least half of them will tell you that bourbon has to be made in Kentucky. That has never been the case, and in fact there has been bourbon made outside of Kentucky as long as it has been called bourbon.
In fact, two brothers from Nicholas County, Kentucky, founded a distillery in Weston, Missouri, in the mid-19th century — one that still crafts bourbon with the same care and character today. As the oldest distillery west of the Mississippi River, Holladay’s legacy endures through its Ben Holladay 1856 Original, Holladay Soft Red Wheat, and the Rickhouse Proof bourbon expressions. Following a 2025 limited release of the Ben Holladay One Barrel 8-Year, the story continues with a 10-Year expression on the horizon.
“We have this history that dates back to 1856 with Ben and David Holladay starting our facility after coming up from Kentucky,” says Holladay Distillery master distiller Kyle Merklein. “Everything that they did was the traditional bourbon methods at the time. So, we are rooted in that traditional bourbon style. We did that from 1856 up until 1985.”
If the historical Holladay name sounds familiar, it’s likely because Ben Holladay made his mark as a trailblazing entrepreneur, earning the nickname ‘The Stagecoach King’ for his stagecoach empire and investing in the brief but groundbreaking Pony Express.
Holladay chose the Weston site for several reasons, including the presence of a limestone spring.
“Lewis and Clark charted the limestone springs here in 1804 and documented a great place to water horses,” Merklein explains. “That was the reason why the Holladay brothers would have been here — they saw that limestone spring water was available. They came from that Kentucky region where you knew that great source of water to make bourbon.”
Unfortunately, the distillery, after surviving Prohibition, was shuttered in 1985 and fell into disrepair, though other beverage alcohol business continued on the site. In 2015, a decision was made to rebuild the distillery and get back into the bourbon business. There was still a manmade cave on the property, along with a few rickhouses, and many of the people who work at Holladay now had done so back in the 1980s, when the shuttered distillery was still operating. They were able to point out where certain buildings had been and, most notably, the location of a lost cistern fed by the spring right in the middle of the property that had been covered over by a building.
“It was an old maintenance shop, and people had their desks back there,” Merklein recalls. “There was steel covering the floor, and no one really asked questions. We removed that and saw this hand-laid limestone cistern. It's 35 feet deep and holds 45,000 gallons of water. It was all present. So we built up the structure around that, then started digging around a bit more to find the spring boxes, 30-plus years of accumulation.”
The rickhouses onsite were, thankfully, still usable, despite the fact that the most recent one was built more than 75 years ago, and the manmade cave has since become a place to store special barrels and is part of the distillery tour. As production ramped up, the team quickly realized they were running out of room in the two rickhouses, which had capacities of just under 10,000 barrels and just over 11,000 barrels, respectively.
At first, the team considered putting up a 20,000-barrel rickhouse that would basically double their capacity, but that's not the route they ended up taking. Instead, they ended up rethinking that process and went with another 11,000-barrel rickhouse with the same seven-story structure and traditional ricking style as the other two.
“We wanted to make sure that the style of bourbon we're producing now remains consistent with the existing rickhouse’s thermal mass,” Merklein explains. “If you made it twice as large, put in twice as many barrels, you're not going to get the same temperature fluctuation as what we're currently seeing in our current rickhouses, and that would have made bourbon that tasted different.”
The rickhouses all have wooden ricks and are clad in white-painted metal, which allows for gentler heating in the summer than a black metal-clad warehouse. There’s no heat cycling, which many distilleries use to speed or alter maturation. Instead, natural hot and cold cycles are used to highlight seasonal differentiation, enhancing personality and dimension in the bourbon.
For a distillery so steeped in tradition, only the original mash bill could do when production finally came back online after a 30-year hiatus.
“It was that ratio, the 73 per cent corn, 15 per cent rye, and 12 per cent malted barley, I know specifically we did that post-Prohibition, because I have all those TTB records and all of those documents going back to that,” Merklein says. “Ben Holladay’s original ledgers I believe we also have on-site.”
In 2022, Ben Holladay Bourbon was finally released as a six-year-old bottled-in-bond. One of the most notable details was the amount of information on the label — not just the usual information like proof, state, and style of whiskey, but also the rickhouse detail right down to what percentage of barrels came from which floor in the rickhouse.
Back in 2022, when the Holladay team started thinking about the label and the package and the information behind it, they started out with the bottled-in-bond idea.
“We wanted to tell the true story that we did this ourselves, that it took six years, and we did it the hard way,” Merklein recalls. “We, as consumers at that time, felt like there often was not enough detail given about bourbon. We wanted to embrace full transparency, so any detail we could give about our bourbon, anything that we as bourbon consumers would want to know about it, we wanted to tell people from the beginning.”
The Holladay Bourbon labels talk about where the barrels are coming from each season, embracing that seasonality. Not only does it have to come from that season, but that season also is placed in different locations in that rickhouse, and that changes the taste profile ever so slightly.
“Every bottle is going to taste like our product, but there's going to be those slight subtle shifts that happen,” Merklein concludes. We're really trying to make sure that we bring that to light, on the bottle and on our website, giving those full details behind everything from the beginning.”
Ben Holladay’s pioneering spirit has left an enduring legacy in the bourbon world that is finally being celebrated by whiskey fans everywhere.
Learn more at www.holladaybourbon.com.
