Inside Bardstown Bourbon Company: A Rick House Tour with Crystal and Roger

Behind the Pour

Bardstown Bourbon Company opened in 2016 in Bardstown, Kentucky — the self-proclaimed Bourbon Capital of the World — with an unusual model: a destination distillery with a culinary program, an events venue, a world-class cocktail bar, and a contract distilling operation that makes whiskey for other brands alongside their own. Crystal and Roger get a rick house tour — the aging warehouses where bourbon lives between distillation and bottling. Most spirits drinkers never see this part of the process, and the tour reveals the physical reality behind every age statement on every label.

What You'll Discover

• What a rick house is: A multi-story wooden warehouse designed specifically for bourbon aging. The ricks are the wooden frames that hold the barrels in stacked rows at each level — hundreds of barrels per floor, thousands per building.
• Temperature cycling and why it matters: Rick houses experience dramatic seasonal swings in temperature. In summer, the bourbon inside each barrel expands, pushing deeper into the char and wood and extracting vanilla, caramel, and tannin compounds. In winter, it contracts, drawing some of that character back. Multiple cycles per year build the flavor profile.
• The angel's share: Each year in Kentucky's climate, roughly 2–4% of a barrel's volume evaporates through the wood. Over a decade of aging, a barrel loses significant volume — the 'share' that the angels are said to take. It is not just a romantic term; it is a real cost of aging.
• Position within the rick house affects flavor: Barrels at the top levels of a rick house experience more heat and more temperature variation than barrels at the lower levels. The same distillate aged for the same time in different positions within the same warehouse develops differently. Position rotation is one tool distillers use to create consistency across large batches.
• Bardstown's scale and innovation: As one of Kentucky's newer major distilleries, Bardstown has built modern warehouses with significant capacity. Their glass-walled rickhouse experiment — exposing barrels to natural light and outdoor temperature cycles — is one of the more distinctive production innovations currently in progress in American bourbon.

A Moment of Pourspective

Every age statement on a bourbon label represents time that cannot be rushed. The rick house is where patience lives — thousands of barrels at different positions, aging through Kentucky summers and winters, being slowly transformed by wood, air, and heat. A tour of a rick house is the most honest thing a distillery can show you.

Explore the Conversation

The Bardstown rick house tour is one of TLC's most immersive episodes — Crystal and Roger are on-site, walking through the physical space, and the episode conveys the scale of a serious bourbon operation in a way that a studio tasting cannot. The visual environment is part of the story. The temperature cycling explanation is the episode's most educational segment. Crystal connects the physical expansion-and-contraction cycle to the flavor compounds that bourbon drinkers experience in the glass — specifically why older bourbons tend to have more concentration, more oak, and more of the Maillard reaction products (vanilla, caramel) that the barrel contributes. Bardstown's contract distilling model is a detail that surprises many visitors. The distillery produces whiskey for other brands — a common practice in Kentucky that most consumers are not aware of. The tour provides context for understanding that the brand on the label and the distillery that made the spirit can be different entities, without treating that as a scandal.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is a rick house? A rick house (or rackhouse) is a multi-story wooden warehouse used specifically for bourbon barrel aging. The ricks are the wooden frames that support barrels stacked in rows at each level.
• What is the angel's share? The angel's share is the portion of a barrel's contents that evaporates through the wood each year during aging. In Kentucky's climate, approximately 2–4% is lost per year.
• What is Bardstown Bourbon Company? Bardstown Bourbon Company is a major Kentucky distillery founded in 2016, operating both a flagship production facility and a contract distilling operation that produces whiskey for other brands. Located in Bardstown, Kentucky.
• Does barrel position really affect bourbon flavor? Yes. Barrels in upper warehouse positions experience more heat and greater temperature variation than lower barrels, producing more intensive barrel interaction and a different flavor development timeline. Some distilleries rotate barrels; others use position variation intentionally.

Episode at a Glance

• Location: Bardstown Bourbon Company, Bardstown, Kentucky
• Hosts: Crystal and Roger
• Runtime: 19 minutes, 22 seconds
• Category: Bourbon
• Format: On-site rick house tour and education