Some trips announce themselves. Others sneak up on you somewhere between the Ohio River and a parking spot on a narrow street in a town that time apparently decided to leave mostly alone.

This was the first stop on our Alabama pour tour, which I realize makes it technically not in Alabama at all, but Augusta, Kentucky sits close enough to the Ohio border that it felt like a reasonable warmup. My wife and I left central Ohio on a Thursday morning, pointed ourselves south on I-71, and somewhere around Wilmington made the call to abandon the interstate in favor of the backroads. We wound down through Georgetown, Ohio — and I use the word “town” loosely, because if there’s much of one there I didn’t notice it — where the plan was to cross the Ohio River into Kentucky.

There is no bridge at Georgetown. What there is instead is a ferry.

We pulled up to the riverbank just in time to watch the barge push off from the Ohio shore without us. Missed it by that much. Fortunately the crossing is short and it wasn’t long before the ferry came back around. The loading ramps stay down permanently on this thing — the operator just runs it straight into the bank until contact is made — and we pulled up onto the ramp with the ferry already underway before I’d even gotten the truck in park. Five minutes later we drove off the other side and into Augusta, Kentucky, a river town that turned out to be considerably busier than I had any reason to expect on an early Thursday afternoon.

The Town Itself

Augusta feels like it jumped off the pages of a Mark Twain novel, which turns out to be less of a stretch than it sounds — the town served as a filming location for The Adventures of Huck Finn back in the day, and you can see why they picked it. Well-preserved historic buildings that I’d guess date to the late 1800s, narrow streets lined with florists and small shops, the whole thing sitting right on the river with an unhurried quality that most small towns spend decades trying to manufacture and never quite pull off. Augusta apparently just always had it.

The distillery sits at the east end of town, and we had some time to kill before our 3:30 tour, so we settled into the Augusta Pub for a late lunch. It’s the kind of afternoon that feels like it belongs to someone else’s life — ferry across the Ohio, lunch in a river town, bourbon tour to follow. Highly recommended as a format.

The Building

Augusta Distillery looks like a distillery from the outside, which sounds like a low bar until you’ve visited enough craft operations housed in office suites and repurposed boot factories to appreciate when a building actually announces what it is. The structure has an industrial character to it — early to mid-twentieth century, something that clearly started its life as a factory of some kind before being converted — and it’s well signed and easy to find. No directory required. No second floor, no wrong door.

Walking in, you pass through an entrance fashioned to feel like the inside of a barrel — a fabric tunnel that pulls the trick off better than it sounds, setting the tone before you’ve taken ten steps. Through that you emerge into a large, open tasting room, the kind of space that could comfortably hold scores of people and probably hosts some genuinely good events when the right occasion calls for it. Merchandise up front, a bar across the back, a dedicated meeting room off to one side where they run cigar rolling classes alongside whiskey tastings. The whole setup has a polish and intentionality to it that signals real investment.

Out back, adjacent to the actual distilling building, there’s an outdoor gathering space with a clear view into the production operation. The kind of space that’s built for food trucks and live music and warm evenings with a good pour in hand. They run events back there, and based on the setup alone I’d expect them to be worth showing up for.

This is not a scrappy micro operation finding its footing in a borrowed corner of someone else’s building. Augusta Distillery is a major investment built deliberately for scale. Not Buffalo Trace. Not Wild Turkey. But unambiguously industrial in intent, with a 33,000-barrel rickhouse already full and a second 45,000-barrel rickhouse currently going up and being stocked as it’s built. Whatever Augusta is right now, it’s also clearly what Augusta intends to become.

Where It Comes From

Augusta Distillery was founded in 2018 by three college friends — Lance Bates, Robert Burns, and Jeff Johnson — who built the operation around a straightforward and demanding philosophy: single barrel, cask strength Kentucky whiskey, aged a minimum of eight years. No shortcuts on the timeline, no blending away the character of an individual barrel. The kind of commitment that either pays off or doesn’t, and in Augusta’s case paid off in a significant way when their Buckner’s 13 Year was named Best Bourbon in the World at the 2023 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. That’s not a minor footnote.

Running the production side is Master Distiller Alexandra Castle, who grew up in Kentucky not far from Augusta, spent nine years away working at Old Dominick Distillery in Memphis and Wild Turkey in Lawrenceburg, and came home when the opportunity to help build something from the ground up presented itself. The distillery and event center came fully online in 2024, and Castle has been clear about what she’s building toward — a destination on the bourbon trail that puts this particular stretch of the Ohio River back on the map it helped create. Augusta, Kentucky sits on what was part of the original Bourbon County, and corn-based distillations were moving through this town on flatboats headed downriver long before bourbon had a name. Castle appears to be aware of that history and uninterested in wasting it.

Thirty Minutes Early and a Flight at the Bar

We arrived about a half hour ahead of our tour time, which turned out to be the right call. We took seats at the bar and I asked the bartender to put together a flight — specifically the expressions that wouldn’t be covered during the River Proof experience we’d booked. He recommended the Old Route 8 bourbon, the Buckner’s Single Barrel 10, and the Buckner’s Single Barrel 13. I have full reviews of all three in the works — I’ll link those below once they’re posted — [LINK PLACEHOLDER] but the short version is that everything in that flight was genuinely good, the kind of good that makes you understand why a distillery this young is already generating the attention it is.

I asked questions while I sipped, the way I always do, and the bartender was friendly but a little coy with some of the details. What he did confirm is that everything currently on offer is sourced whiskey — produced in Kentucky, though he wouldn’t say by whom. That’s not unusual for a distillery that’s been building inventory and waiting for their own barrels to come of age, and it doesn’t reflect poorly on the product. The whiskey is good. Where it was made is a secondary consideration to whether it’s worth drinking, and this is. I’ll leave my speculation about the source where it belongs, which is at the bar and not in print.

The River Proof Barrel Experience

The tour itself — the River Proof Barrel Experience — is less a deep technical education in distilling and more a participatory event, and I mean that as a genuine compliment rather than a hedge. Our guide (James, I think, though I’ll admit my certainty there is limited) walked us through the space and the story, but the real point of the experience is getting your hands on the product in a way that most distillery tours don’t allow.

You pop the bung out of a barrel yourself. You dip the thief in and pull your own sample straight from the wood. It’s a small thing in theory and a surprisingly satisfying one in practice — there’s something about the directness of it, the barrel to glass without ceremony, that makes you feel like you’re in on something rather than just being shown around. For anyone who’s done enough distillery tours to have seen the standard version a few times, the River Proof experience offers something the standard version doesn’t.

I wound up thieving an entire bottle of their wheated bourbon and corking it myself before we left. My wife kissed the cork before I pressed it in — a wish sealed into the bottle along with the whiskey. I don’t know how far back that tradition goes or where it comes from, but it felt right in the moment, and I wasn’t about to argue with it. It’s sitting on the shelf back in Ohio right now and I haven’t opened it yet. I expect it’ll be great. When I do crack it I’ll put a proper review up here — [LINK PLACEHOLDER] — but for now it’s serving an equally important function, which is reminding me of a very good afternoon in a very good river town every time I look at it.

Worth the Ferry Ride

Augusta Distillery is operating at a different scale than most of what I write about on the pour tour. This isn’t a two-person operation in a repurposed boot factory or a second-career pivot into a second-floor studio suite. It’s a real distillery with real ambition and the infrastructure to back it up, producing award-winning bourbon in a town that was built for exactly this kind of thing long before anyone thought to build a distillery there.

The experience is polished without being corporate about it. The bourbon is good now and probably going to be better when their own barrels start coming of age. The River Proof experience is the right way to do it if you’re making the trip, and the trip itself — backroads down through Ohio, ferry across the river, lunch in a town that Mark Twain would have recognized — is more than half the point.

Book the tour. Take the ferry. Get there a little early and sit at the bar.

Augusta Distillery  |  207 Seminary Avenue, Augusta, KY 41002

augustakydistillery.com

Wednesday – Saturday: 11am – 5pm