Heaven Hill Springs is the newest and biggest distillery in Bardstown, a $200 million plant that brought Heaven Hill’s stills home in 2025 after the 1996 fire. You can’t drive up and walk in. The only way inside is the Heaven Hill Springs Distillery Tour, which launched at $55, leaves by shuttle from the Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience and spends about an hour on the production floor before a guided tasting at the distillery’s own bar. Book it if you want to see modern bourbon making at full industrial scale, and read on for what that looks like.
The comeback story
For most of a century, the Heaven Hill name in Bardstown meant a distillery on Gilkey Run Road. It filled its first barrel on December 13, 1935, as the Old Heavenhill Springs distillery. On November 7, 1996, lightning struck one of its rickhouses during a storm, and the fire that followed took the distillery, seven warehouses and roughly 90,000 to 100,000 barrels of whiskey. Heaven Hill’s own account puts the loss at “almost 100,000 barrels.” Brown-Forman and Jim Beam helped with production, and in 1999 Heaven Hill bought the Bernheim Distillery in Louisville, where it made its whiskey for the next quarter century.
The company announced the new plant in 2022 as a $135 million project. By the time the doors opened, Heaven Hill reported a $200 million investment. The first barrel was filled in April 2025, the grand opening was September 4, 2025, and public tours began four days later. The name is a deliberate nod to the 1935 original. Master distiller emeritus Charlie Downs is the only Heaven Hill employee to have worked at all four of the company’s distilleries, and the plant runs under Master Distiller Conor O’Driscoll.
What you’ll see on the tour
The plant was built for volume. It opened with capacity for 150,000 barrels a year (10 million proof gallons) and is designed to scale to 450,000 barrels (30 million proof gallons). The centerpiece is a 60-foot Vendome copper still producing more than 33,000 proof gallons a day, and the distillery propagates Heaven Hill’s own yeast strain on site.
The tour runs roughly like this:
- Check in at the Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience and board the shuttle.
- Ride out to the distillery, which sits north of downtown off KY 245.
- Go behind the scenes with a guide, with the 60-foot copper still as the headline and the on-site quality lab along the way.
- Finish with a guided tasting at the distillery’s signature bar.
- Shuttle back to the Bourbon Experience.
Expect a clean, bright, very modern facility. One 2026 visitor write-up called it “highly automated,” noted the whole plant runs with a five-person staff, and enjoyed “riding the private transit bus and eating raw barley straight from the quality lab.” If you want creaky floorboards and a pot still you can touch, book Willett or Preservation instead. If you’ve always wondered how the bourbon on your supermarket shelf gets made, this is the clearest look in Nelson County.
Green details worth asking about
The Spirits Business report on the opening lists sustainability features that guides like to point out: on-site wastewater pretreatment that produces renewable energy, water savings of more than 24,000 gallons a day, stormwater basins, and restoration of white oak woodland and native prairie on the grounds. Heaven Hill also pledged $500,000 to the Bardstown Aquatic and Sports Center when it opened.
Prices, times and booking
| Detail | What to know |
|---|---|
| Price | $55 per person at launch; confirm on the booking page |
| Group size | Small groups |
| Time at the distillery | About 1 hour, plus the shuttle |
| Where it departs | Heaven Hill Bourbon Experience, 1311 Gilkey Run Rd |
| Ages | Tastings are 21+ with valid photo ID |
| How to book | Online through Heaven Hill’s booking page |
Tour times are published on the booking calendar, which follows the Bourbon Experience hours: Monday through Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 1 to 5 p.m. Small groups sell out first on fall weekends, around the Kentucky Bourbon Festival and during National Bourbon Week in June, so book as soon as your dates are firm. Our guide to booking distillery tours covers how far ahead to plan in each season.
A few practical tips:
- Arrive at the Bourbon Experience 15 to 20 minutes before departure so you’re checked in when the shuttle loads.
- Wear closed-toe shoes. It’s a working plant.
- One Heaven Hill tour per person per day is the legal limit, so don’t plan a Bourbon Experience tasting on the same day as the Springs tour.
- The shuttle solves the parking question at the plant, but someone still has to drive back from Gilkey Run Road. Line up a designated driver or a car service.
Springs tour or a campus tasting?
Because you can take only one Heaven Hill tour a day, it’s a real choice. Pick the Springs tour if you’ve never seen a large distillery running, if you like engineering, or if you want to say you visited the newest plant in Bardstown. Pick a campus experience at the Bourbon Experience, such as the Bottled-in-Bond warehouse walk, if you care more about aging, history and old rickhouses than stainless steel. With two days in town, do both, one on each day.
The opening bottle
To mark the opening, Heaven Hill released Heaven Hill Master Distillers Unity, a 107-proof bourbon at $225, about 4,000 bottles, sold only on site. Whether any remains will depend on when you visit, so ask in the gift shop at the Bourbon Experience rather than counting on it. Site-only releases are one of the reasons collectors make the trip; our page on buying bourbon in Bardstown explains how to get bottles home.
How it fits into your trip
Treat the Springs tour as a two-hour block that starts and ends at the Bourbon Experience. Browse the galleries while you wait, then eat lunch at Five Brothers Bar & Kitchen after you return (it serves until 4:30 p.m.). From there, Willett is about five minutes away for an afternoon tour on a different ticket. If you want the backstory before you go, read our history of bourbon in Nelson County, and if you want the mechanics, how bourbon is made walks through every stage you’ll see from the catwalks.
Is it worth $55?
For most visitors, yes. It is the only chance to watch Heaven Hill make whiskey in Bardstown, the facility is brand new, and the tasting at the end is on home ground. The trade-off is atmosphere: this is a modern industrial plant, not a historic farm distillery, and a guided walk through stainless steel won’t charm everyone. If you’ve already toured two or three big producers, spend the money on a smaller, older place instead. If this is your first distillery tour, or you simply want to see the machine at full size, it’s one of the best hours in the county.
