B ack in the 1950s, the bourbon industry was still very much recovering from prohibition in America which had ended less than two decades earlier. Nearly all distillers were focused on the arduous (and, some would say, idiotic) pursuit of making ends meet in a business model that demanded they invest fortunes to produce a product that required years and years of maturing before any return was realized. And the distilleries at the time reflected this single-minded pursuit. Like the whisky they were making at the time, distilleries were harsh, intense, and largely unappealing – as unattractive a place to spend time as any noisy, dangerous and intense plant in the post-war industrialized world. And yet one individual had a bigger vision for what a bourbon distillery could be. What if, instead of just a site where you produced and manufactured bourbon whisky, a distillery was a welcoming, charming place where you could host vis...