Kentucky Bourbon Trail will start in Louisville

Louisville will be the official starting point for the Kentucky Bourbon Trail once a newly announced project inside the Frazier History Museum on Main Street is complete.

The project, announced Thursday, creates a gateway at the Frazier for the Kentucky Distillers' Association's famous bourbon tourism venture through Kentucky distilleries.

Additionally, organizers say it will complement other museums and bourbon attractions in the area.

"It almost ties a bow around this whole bourbon experience," said J. McCauley "Mac" Brown, the museum board's treasurer and a member of the family that controls Louisville-based liquor maker Brown-Forman Corp., where he is a vice president

Distillers' Association President Eric Gregory said his members, many of whom have their own tourism sites, including on the same street, are excited about what might seem to some to be competition. Where other bourbon tourism projects generally are tied to a brand, the museum exhibit will feature the category.

"Our members see this as entirely complementary because they do an incredible job of promoting and telling the histories and stories of their brands, which is what they should be doing," Gregory said. "This is an opportunity for us to really tell the history of bourbon and the history of American through the lens of bourbon. And it's something that we can change out too" with different exhibits and programming.

The project's origins go back almost a year when the Frazier Museum and the Distillers' Association partnered on a bourbon history exhibit that included the National Archives' copy of the congressional resolution declaring bourbon to be America's native spirit.

"We are excited about the role the Frazier will play in the growing bourbon boom," Mayor Greg Fischer said in the announcement. "... As Louisville joins the rest of the state in building on this exciting bourbon boom, Kentucky will become a global bourbon destination that cannot be duplicated anywhere in the world."

Initial plans call for the museum to house and manage the bourbon exhibit, which would be done as the museum is expected to expand into three buildings adjacent to its current location on West Main.

The buildings were a gift to the museum from Laura Frazier and Catherine Frazier Joy, when their father Owsley Brown Frazier, the museum founder and Brown-Forman heir, died two and a half years ago.

The bourbon-related exhibits and visitor experiences would highlight the history and cultural importance of one of Kentucky's signature industries, officials said.

But exactly how the bourbon space would look, where in the museum it would be, when it might open or the cost remain to be determined.

Organizers have hired the international Imagination creative agency that created the Guinness Storehouse experience in Dublin among other projects to develop plans.

In conjunction with that, a capital campaign is being started for the project, which organizers only can say now will be a "multi-million-dollar" exhibition.

"You're not going to walk into the door and go right to the bourbon exhibit and left to the rest of the Frazier," Brown said. "We absolutely don't want that, because this is part of the Frazier. It's not a separate entity to the Frazier. ... It has to fit in the Frazier's mission. To tell the story of our heritage, our culture, our history is what the Frazier is about, and bourbon is such a big part of that that it just makes sense to include it here."

The fact that the bourbon exhibit is at a facility created by a member of the Brown family isn't cause-and-effect, organizers said.

"This is not a Brown-Forman driven thing at all," Brown said, "but I will tell you what, I think the company would be very proud of it, I think the family would be proud of it, just like the rest of distilling families would be."

Interim museum director Paula Hale said Imagination also is studying what the museum can do to accommodate other exhibits and programming.

Regardless of what that vision is the museum, now 10 years old, is expected to expand into the other buildings, Hale said.

"Don't think in terms of vertical, think horizontally," Brown said.