Glenns Creek Distilling
By Meghan Swanson
Twenty people can use identical coffee makers for years; yawning in the pre-dawn light, they can add the prescribed amount of grounds, give it the required water, listen to it hiss and bubble, and eagerly await the rising aroma of fresh coffee without a second thought. Perhaps one in those twenty will handle the glass pot, watch the clear water funnel into the machine, or push the paper filter into the plastic reservoir, and wonder–who made this? How did they make it? David Meier is one of those people. It was his natural curiosity and maker’s mindset that led him into the halls of manufacturing giants all around the world, until he ran across a half-derelict property on Glenns Creek (no apostrophe, thank you) in Frankfort, Kentucky. It was here in this verdant place, already being reclaimed by the wild, that he would come to understand the whiskey makers of old.
“My whole journey starts in shop class in high school, where I taught myself how to weld. And that’s important because that interest in welding led me to go to college.”
David grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; after high school, he went to Kentucky to attend Berea College for a degree in Industrial Technology Management. “Which is a fancy way of saying shop class,” David quips. “Prior to that [time] in my life I, like a lot of people, never considered really where things come from.” he says. It was a natural fit for David, who had received his first tool set at 13 years old and had been fixing things ever since. Years later, he ended up working for Toyota’s operation in Kentucky and learned their world-famous Toyota Production System. David became a consultant, traveling and teaching other companies how to use Toyota’s ultra-efficient system. “I finally got to go to places like Japan and Europe,” David recalls. “When you see history in person it becomes much more interesting.”
David was fascinated by the structures and machines of the past, but not necessarily by bourbon. “When I was 50 [years old], looking back, I had probably only had five bourbons in my entire life.” He reveals. “I didn’t dislike bourbon; I didn’t like bourbon. I just didn’t drink bourbon.” He says. He did, however, still weld. “I like to experiment; I like trying things. I like making things.” He says. Past hobbies of David’s include skills like glassblowing, pottery, woodworking, and of course, metalworking. One day in 2009, a colleague came in to work buzzing with excitement about a new hobby he wanted to try: distilling. “He was going to make sugar shine, and he wondered if I could build a still for him.” David remembers. “I thought that was a rather unusual request, because I didn’t know anything about distilling.” He recalls. Even so, he read the materials his colleague brought to him and repurposed a 15-gallon beer keg into a pot still with an electric heater.
“Years later, I was at his house and noticed the still wasn’t being used—had never been used,” David remarks. “For some reason, I suggested he give it back to me. I have no idea how to use it,” he explains. “But I went on Amazon, trying to find books about distilling. I went on YouTube, Facebook…wherever you young kids get information these days.” He says with a smile. But what to make on his newly reacquired still? Sugar shine seemed boring to him. “I thought well, maybe I’ll try bourbon. I’m in Kentucky, and I don’t know anything about bourbon.” He recalls.
“What I’ve learned in my career is that when everybody says, ‘this is how you have to do it’, that’s probably not true. When everybody says, ‘you can’t do this’, that’s probably not true.”
David started to dig into distilling, learning everything he could and figuring out how the process worked. “I had cabinets full of these experiments,” he recalls. “There’s something especially gratifying about taking these basic ingredients and letting nature do what it does, and then you can put it through your still that you made yourself and something comes out that you can actually drink and not die,” he says with a laugh. As he learned, he began to develop his own style as a distiller. He fermented whatever he could get his hands on and distilled it all on the still he’d made with his own hands. He shared his efforts with friends and was content to simply chalk distilling up in his long column of hobbies. “It wasn’t my mission to have a distillery. It wasn’t something I was actively pursuing; I was just having fun experimenting.” He explains.
“And then somebody mentioned this place,” David tells us, gesturing to the room around him. Glenns Creek’s physical location is a property that was first built upon in the 1870s, and today boasts buildings in various states of repair and decades of origin. It is the site of the original Old Crow Distillery, named in honor of Dr. James C. Crow, a Scottish chemist, doctor, and immigrant to the United States, who distilled one of Kentucky’s earliest and best-known bourbons. He sold it as ‘Crow’, or, if it was aged more than three years, ‘Old Crow’. (The brand known today as Old Crow is owned by Beam Suntory and hasn’t been produced on the Glenns Creek site since the 1980s.) “When I came out and saw it,” David recalls, “I mean…just the historical significance was pretty compelling.” he finishes.
“Honestly, it seemed like, ‘Oh, hey, here’s an idea: let’s buy that and start a distillery.” David says. “And the price was in my budget.” he tells us. The price of the property was within his budget, he clarifies - the price of bringing Glenns Creek to life was another question entirely. “What I tell people is there’s two ways to start a distillery: the first way is expensive. The second way is really damned expensive.” he reveals. “No matter how you go about it, it’s going to be expensive.” he sums up. In 2014, David and a business partner (with whom David has since parted ways) bought the abandoned Old Crow distillery. By 2015, all the required permits and licenses were in place for distilling to begin, and the former Old Crow Distillery was alive again with the sounds and scents of whiskey-making after nearly four decades of silence.
“When you’re privileged to operate in a historic place with this legacy, you know, you have some responsibility for trying to respect that.”
The location of David’s new-to-him distillery is a really good one; folks following their GPS directions to Buffalo Trace drive right past his front gate. Beam Suntory is still their neighbor, and even has an Old Crow sign out in front of their entrance. “When I learned that the Old Crow Distillery was for sale, I had never been out here before. So I drove out, saw that sign, and pulled in there.” David recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness–for that price, I’m getting a really great deal,'” he recounts. “The security guard came out and asked if he could help me; I said ‘Well, I think I’m here to buy the place,” David remembers. The guard laughed. “He said ‘I don’t think so. I think you want to go further down the road.” David says. “I got in my car, drove it another 100 yards or so, and pulled up to this old, dilapidated, overgrown place.” he tells us. “And I thought, ‘That makes a lot more sense for the price.’”
The old distillery is a vision of glorious ruin; its dark empty windows peer out from weather-stained, faded brick and greenery climbs it like a vegetal tsunami frozen in the act of crashing over the building. A curiously perfect, round red-brick chimney stands tall over a neighboring building of gray stone, and another building boasts corrugated metal sides, its exterior streaked with dark, weeping water stains left there by decades of weather. It looks as if it was plucked out of a Southern Gothic tale and hidden among the trees, to sleep and gently decay. “It was never abandoned, but it was never maintained either.” explains David. “There’s poison ivy back there bigger than your forearm.” he says. “There’s just something about it [the property] that attracts people. It attracts me, anyway.” he shares.
The most important consideration for the property’s original builders was access to fresh, clean water prior to the availability of electricity and filtration. The first building on the site was situated next to a spring where they could draw water from. The eponymous Glenns Creek was useful for turning the wheel that milled their grain, and close proximity to the Kentucky River allowed access to a vast, water-based distribution network. “You’ve got access to the Kentucky River, which takes you to the Ohio River, which takes you to the Mississippi River, which takes you to New Orleans.” David explains. The warehouses were erected in the remaining decades of the 19th century, and newer buildings continued to be added up until the middle of the 20th century. David is speaking to us from a 1940s building that once housed a bottling line. The old bottling line (now the Glenns Creek tasting room) and its brethren clustered close by are the only ones left on the property that had electricity by the time David got ahold of the place. “See, the scrap guys came in and, any big copper wires [they found], they cut [them] out and removed all the copper. Their mission was to take it down; it wasn’t to preserve it, or to use it, the mission was to get rid of it.” he explains.
Piece by piece, David and his people are slowly restoring the old property. “Step number one was production, get the process up, get it running, and get a business going.” David tells us. “Step number two was preservation.” he says. “It’s all still coming out of the business. There are no outside investors.” David reveals. It’s a daunting task, but one he has a clear vision for. “It’s not to try to make it pristine and make everything beautiful. It’s to preserve it, respect it you know.” he says. “I have a vision that some of the places in the old distillery that are just not going to be practical to use would become like a museum [exhibit]. People want to see that history.” he sums up. “I do some grounds walks here from time to time, spring and fall…and people were clamoring for it. Man, they love it. We don’t even go inside most of the buildings because there’s hazard stuff in there, but–people want to see it.” he says.
At Glenns Creek, people can do more than just see the former Old Crow Distillery. They can taste its spirit in Cuervito Vivo, the bourbon Glenns Creek has made based on Dr. Crow’s bourbon, made onsite long ago. David and his team have worked hard to reproduce its mash bill and have named it appropriately; the name translates to “the little crow lives”.
“When you’re in automotive [manufacturing] or you’re dealing with airplanes…people can die if you screw up stuff. When I started distilling, I had to accept the reality that there’s way too many variables and that you control almost none of them.”
As a newcomer to the field of distilling and someone who can’t help but think outside the box, David’s approach to making whiskey was guaranteed not to be cookie-cutter. He started by breaking an oft-repeated rule of thumb: never use wild yeast. “I realized that a lot of information was coming from home brewers who had transitioned over into distilling,” he explains. “And were approaching it the same way [as brewing]. Not that that’s wrong–it’s just that I discovered in some cases it’s not necessary.” he finishes. At the beginning, he learned what he knew about yeast from a book. “I was reading the book and–you know–flashbulb goes off,” he recalls. “Yeast, when it dies, it creates a spore and the spores go airborne, just like mushroom spores do, and they can remain dormant.” he tells us. “What if there’s any of the Old Crow yeast back in the facility?” he asked. Buckets with ‘snacks’ for the hungry, dormant yeast spores were placed in different locations around the old distillery. “What I didn’t think about was the critters who have been living here all these years; raccoons, possums, pigeons and things. So they got in all our buckets, except for one.” he recalls. OCD #5–Glenns Creek’s flagship bourbon–actually got its name from that experiment. The lucky bucket that didn’t fall prey to the resident critters was in the former Old Crow Distillery’s fermentation tank number five; not only has David used it in OCD #5, which was named 2023’s US Micro Whiskey of the Year in Jim Murray’s Whiskey Bible, but in all of Glenns Creek’s whiskeys.
Some of the choices David has made at Glenns Creek are purely practical. They manufacture their own stills out of stainless steel, not copper. “Copper does do a magnificent job–but it’s extremely expensive.” he says. “If you want a copper tank, you’re talking about buying a still. If you want a ‘stainless steel tank’, you go on Craigslist, you find a [food-grade, stainless steel] tank…it’s $1 per gallon of capacity, that’s a good price.” he explains. IBC totes–large-capacity, food-grade plastic tanks commonly used for storing and moving both liquids and dry goods–serve as their fermenters. Other choices David has made are more artistic in nature, like using direct heat on their stills. “It’s extra work. It’s a pain in the butt. But I think it generates a better product,” he opines.
Glenns Creek is not operating in a massive, modern space; David has been limited to what he was able to carve out of the ruins. “This facility is not very easy to expand because of the location. So space is ultimately what we constantly have to think about.” he tells us. That includes their rackhouse: a single story warehouse without temperature control where all of the barrels are aged no more than six feet off the floor. The barrels weather Kentucky’s variable temperatures and conditions together, whether it’s 20 degrees outside or 60 degrees. “I’m gonna give kudos to our cooperage, Kelvin Cooperage.” David says. “Do we pay a premium [for their barrels]? Yes we do. Does it do a better job? I think it does.” he states. David manages differentiation in product by taking a day’s batch of distillate off all three stills, mixing that, and splitting the result into two barrels. “Those barrels are going to spend their life on that rack side by side,” David explains. “When the time comes and we pull samples from them, they will taste different. There is just no predicting what the barrel is going to do.” he tells us. “I don’t worry about that; every single barrel we choose to bottle, we have tasted it. If we like how it tastes, we’re going to put it in a bottle.” he finishes. Each of those barrels is a single barrel bottling; Glenns Creek doesn’t blend its product.
“They say, ‘I’ve been to all these other places, this is my favorite.’ Here’s why: you get to talk to somebody…it’s like sitting down with an old friend, and just having a chat.”
Glenns Creek is the kind of place that feels like a secret; it’s somewhere you heard about from a friend of a friend, and when you pull up, you’re not entirely sure you’re in the right place until you get out of your car and walk in. It’s a rare air of mystery and adventure no marketing department could hope to cultivate with an ad campaign, precisely because there has been no ad campaign. “I think in eight years, I’ve spent $400 on marketing,” David guesses. “It’s all been word of mouth, social media.” he says. “90% or more of our revenue comes from right here. People sit down, they sample the product, and they make a decision.” he shares. This suits David; while he’s not against distribution, he’s conscious of the balancing act it requires. “There’s certain markets we’ll never be able to support,” he admits. “For a small distillery like us, there’s always that struggle of ‘am I going to have enough inventory?’” he explains.
For those who do find out about Glenns Creek and make the journey out, that first moment in the parking lot is crucial. “We have a security camera that points out at our gate, and I don’t think a day goes by where a vehicle doesn’t pull in,” he says. “The conversation in the car is going on: ‘should we try to go in, or are they going to kill us?’” David jokes. “We’re still a little rough on the outside,” he admits. “Some 50% of the time, they circle around and drive away. I figure that’s probably better for both parties; if this doesn’t look like your kind of place, it’s probably better if you opt out.” he shrugs.
Glenns Creek isn’t fancy; it’s a working distillery. “I view this as the skunkworks. This is where we create the products,” David says. “If you want to interact with people who do the work, if you want a personal experience…we take a max of 12 people at each visitor experience.” he points out. “You can do a walk-in tasting out front in our gift shop, and you’re still with somebody who is not a tour guide and who doesn’t just read from the script. They can answer questions, we can talk about the history of the place,” he finishes. The history, the experimentation, and the bourbon is what it’s all about for David. “The brand is this place. The brand is this experience,” he tells us, and that’s how he wants it to continue. “How many times have you heard about the craft place–beer, wine, distilling–that got bought out by the big place, and then everything changed and the product’s not even good anymore?” he asks. “As long as I’m alive, I don’t want that to happen.”
“My vision is to try to preserve the property to some degree, to create some business out of the bigger property. To do that in a way that respects the history of it, the significance of it, and Dr. Crow’s contribution to the industry…if there’s one thing I could accomplish before I’m over and done with, it would be that.”
When David Meier was learning the ropes in the metal shop at Berea College, he probably never imagined that years later, he would be the proud owner of a once-famous, now-dormant distillery only an hours’ drive away from his school. Not much of a bourbon drinker throughout his career in manufacturing, he probably also never pictured himself spending the better part of a decade getting really, really good at making the stuff. Dr. James Crow also probably didn’t picture himself making whiskey in Kentucky back when he studied medicine in Edinburgh, and yet he ended up becoming a distilling giant in the New World and gave America a brand of whiskey that is still widely recognized nearly two hundred years later. The shared qualities that link Meier and Crow through time are the same qualities that might bring you to Glenns Creek Distilling’s doorstep: curiosity, boldness of spirit, and above all, perseverance. After all, haven’t you ever looked at the amber liquid shining in your glass and wondered: who made this? And how?