One side of a barrel warehouse at Barton 1792 Distillery collapsed Friday around 11 a.m. No one was inside Warehouse 30, and there were no injuries. But thousands of barrels of whiskey fell to the ground.
Barrel Warehouse No. 30 was built in the 1940s and held about 18,000 barrels. The company said it believes no more than half of the barrels inside are impacted. It said it was assessing how many of the impacted barrels can be recovered. A mix of various distilled products at various ages were stored in that warehouse.
It may be several days or weeks before a full assessment of the damage to Warehouse 30 at Barton 1792 is fully complete, Sazerac said. It added it doesn’t know which Barton 1792 brands or customers will be impacted.
The Warehouse incident will not affect normal operations or tourism activities; the Distillery was open for tours on Saturday and will resume normal business operations on Monday. Barton 1792’s normal “summer shutdown,” which is when bourbon distilleries shut down for a short time period in the summer for repairs and routine maintenance, began last week. This will not affect bourbon production once the Distillery’s summer shutdown time period ends as already planned.
The Nelson County Gazette reports the collapse was spotted by someone who saw the damaged “rickhouse” from a nearby road. The local newspaper quoted Bardstown’s fire chief as saying the distillery had been “having issues with one wall of the warehouse and had been working on it.”
Production at 1792 Barton had been shut down at the beginning of the week for the distillery’s annual summer maintenance projects.
To see aerial photos of the collapsed warehouse, from the Louisville Courier-Journal, click here.