Origin & History
Est. 1984 · Frankfort, Kentucky
The Bourbon That Started a Revolution — One Barrel at a Time.
How a retirement project became the world's first premium single barrel bourbon — and changed an entire industry forever
In 1984, Master Distiller Elmer T. Lee was nearing retirement when he was given one final task: create a bourbon of exceptionally high quality. He reached back decades, to a memory from his earliest days at the distillery in the late 1940s. He remembered Colonel Albert B. Blanton — the man who ran the distillery for over thirty years — and how the Colonel would quietly slip into Warehouse H, handpick a single "honey barrel" from the centre cut, and bottle it personally for dignitaries, friends and family. No blending. No standardisation. Just one perfect barrel, bottled one at a time. Elmer T. Lee decided to honour that tradition — and in doing so, invented a category that did not yet exist.
When Blanton's Single Barrel launched in 1984, it was genuinely radical. It challenged everything the bourbon industry believed about itself — that consistency meant blending, that premium meant process, that one barrel could never be enough. Blanton's proved otherwise. Today, single barrel bourbon is one of the most celebrated categories in American whiskey. But there was, and always will be, only one original.