Whether made of stone, brick or wood, all rickhouses serve the purpose of protecting whiskey as it ages. But, everything from location and exposure to building design and materials will affect the whiskey aging within.

Heaven Hill’s current roster of 57 rickhouses provide a snapshot of our company’s constant experimentation with rickhouse design since the end of Prohibition. Over our 84-year-history, we have built about half of the rickhouses ourselves, and they each bear the same general design features: seven stories high, wood frames, wood ricks, metal roofs and siding. The other rickhouses represent an amazing variety of designs we’ve acquired as we’ve grown. Some are single-story buildings. Our Deatsville houses, arguably the most visually intriguing rickhouses in America, feature multi-tiered roof sections that convene at a single peak.

Not surprisingly, the whiskeys coming out of each type can taste noticeably different, even when made from the same mashbill and aged equal lengths of time. Those unique qualities demonstrate the undeniable influence an individual rickhouse will have on a whiskey.

For more information about how our rickhouses work, check out Close Up: The Important Rickhouse. Here, we invite you to read on to learn more about the interesting details and history of our rickhouses.

A MIX OF OLD AND NEW PLACED HERE AND THERE

Heaven Hill’s 57 rickhouses are located at six sites in the Kentucky counties of Nelson and Jefferson.

HEAVEN HILL: This is the site of our original distillery, our current finished goods plant, and the Bourbon Heritage Center in Bardstown, Ky. Rickhouses here are: E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. The 22 rickhouses on this site include structures built from the mid-1930s through 2012. Each have a capacity between 18,000 to 22,000 barrels; the site’s total capacity is 504,000 barrels. Seven rickhouses here were destroyed in the infamous 1996 fire that consumed 90,000 barrels of Bourbon… then 2% of the world’s supply. The fire also destroyed our original distillery, which was located, unfortunately, downhill from the flaming river of whiskey.

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