America’s oldest-running distillery, still reeling from historic floods, reopens in time for the Kentucky Derby

Frankfort, Kentucky — For more than two centuries, the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfurt, Kentucky, has bottled up scores of spirits on its 400-acre campus.

But America’s oldest-running distillery ground to a halt last month amid historic and deadly flooding, when Buffalo Trace master distiller Harlen Wheatley says the nearby Kentucky River rose to over 48 feet.  

“Every building that you see had four or five feet of water in it, all over…the site,” Wheatley told CBS News.

Tyler Adams, the distillery’s general manager, says Buffalo Trace has weathered storms before, including a campus-wide flood in 1978 and tornado speed winds damaging multiple buildings in 2006.
 
“We’ve been through prohibition, other floods, tornadoes that took off part of a warehouse,” Adams said.

The bourbon crafters said there are no plans to move to higher ground.

“We have no plans of slowing down,” Wheatley said. “…That water’s just a speed bump.”

Crews hurried to restore tanks ahead of the distillery’s busiest days, dubbed “Derby Week” by locals ahead of Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.

“You need bourbon, you need mint juleps, and you need horses,” local Colleen Calvy said. “Otherwise, it’s not derby.”

And visitors flocking to the Run for the Roses also raced to Buffalo Trace’s gift shop this week, as the distillery reopened for limited tours and tastings.

Layne Wilkerson, Frankfort’s mayor, says the soft reopening marks a step in the right direction for a community still reeling from disaster.
 
“It’s an iconic part of our identity here in Frankfort,” Wilkerson said. “Bourbon, of course, is one of our major industries.”

Wheatley says seeing the distillery back up and running “means something to us too.”

“We have 770 employees,” Wheatley said. “We have a lot of families that depend on the job…and we want to be up and running.”

Nicole Sganga

Nicole Sganga is CBS News’ homeland security and justice correspondent. She is based in Washington, D.C. and reports for all shows and platforms.