Derby winner Guinness McFadden plans 'whiskey Disneyland' in Madison County, but are the odds in his favor?
MADISON COUNTY—It’s been a year now since a group of residents living in the Indigo Run subdivision off Jacks Creek Road and those living near the Whitehall property, first sued the County.
Their complaint named the Fiscal Court and its Board of Adjustments for changing its land use code to grant conditional use permits to industrial developers in agricultural zones, a move the citizens group claims violates the County’s Comprehensive Plan, and impinges on the enjoyment of their properties as guaranteed by the state statute allowing for conditional use permits.
What had provoked the group was the County’s decision last year to issue a conditional use permit for a distillery to be built on just under 600 acres of farmland on Jacks Creek and Tates Creek roads, near the river.
Not just any distillery, the plan is for a Bourbon destination the likes of what American Whiskey Magazine dubbed a “whiskey Disneyland.” In addition to the distillery, the developers say their plans include a bar, a gift shop, a farm-to-table restaurant, and a rickhouse open to the public. They say the distillery itself will take up about 15 percent of the property, and is expected to produce over one hundred thousand barrels of Bourbon annually, while storing up to half a million barrels.
Revolution Holdings, owned by Scott Jenkins of Versailles, is backing the project. Guinness McFadden, owner of Blackwood Distilling Co., also in Versailles, is the visionary behind it. McFadden is also the man behind the Thoroughbred, Country House, winner of the 2019 Kentucky Derby after Maximum Security was disqualified due to interference.
The distillery, if completed, would be the first stop on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail headed north, and the last stop headed south on I-75.
McFadden described his vision for the distillery to American Whiskey Magazine in September of last year as being focused on tourism and “truly having a Napa-style experience in the beautiful hills of Madison County.”
Preserve Madison County, the nonprofit citizens action group suing the Fiscal Court, also named Jenkins and McFadden in their suit.
Word-of-mouth
News of the distillery plans came by word-of-mouth, originating with property owners and farmers of land adjacent to the property owned by Jenkins. Preserve Madison County co-founder, Savannah Westerfield, said that, by chance, she saw a Facebook post about the public hearing for the approval to build Jenkins sought.
“If [a neighbor] hadn’t found out and made that post on our neighborhood page, I never would have known,” Westerfield told The Edge in an interview.
Revolution Holdings did place a sign on the property notifying the public of their application for a conditional use permit, but Westerfield said it was posted in a location where not many people would see it.
“That’s what they were counting on—put the sign up, no one pays attention, approve it and move on. Then we came along,” she said.
That was in March 2024. Within days of learning about the distillery, Westerfield and three others got busy alerting their neighbors. One member of their group distributed hundreds of flyers to area residents and another member created a Facebook group dedicated to halting the distillery. Westerfield called LEX18, and on the night before the public hearing, the NBC affiliate led the evening 6 o’clock news with a story about the project.
Dozens of area residents packed the room at the public hearing the following evening, some having seen the story on the news, others having become alarmed after McFadden held a meeting with the Indigo Run Home Owners Association, and described the breadth of the project, according to Westerfield.
“That’s when we learned this was no hobby distillery, but a full scale industrial operation,” she said.
After listening to more than two hours of public comment during the meeting, the Board of Adjustments tabled the application. In May, the Board revisited the permit, this time with a deputy sheriff present, along with dozens of upset citizens looking on. The decision in favor of the distillery passed 4-1, with Board member Keith Parke voting no.
Upon the decision, the crowd in attendance erupted in jeers, with some yelling, “Shame on y’all!”
Questions over timing
Westerfield said that while she still holds County officials accountable, she believes they are being pressured from Frankfort to make the distillery a reality, and that McFadden and Jenkins assumed it was fixed.
“Just reading the body language of McFadden and his people, they seemed shocked as person after person asked the BOA [Board of Adjustments] to not approve it. You could tell he didn’t think he was going to be in that meeting for two hours,” Westerfield said. “That meeting was also the UK Wildcats opening game of the NCAA tournament, and you know how people can get about basketball around here and they still came and spoke up, knowing they’d miss the game.”
Westerfield and others in the community nonprofit also question the timing of events, and wonder whether plans for the distillery were being made before the County passed its wet law in 2023.
“We don't have proof, but it doesn’t feel like coincidence that in a few short months after the wet vote, the land use regulations changed to allow for a conditional use permit in an agricultural zone for distilleries, and then within six months of that land use change, there were two applications for distilleries in Madison County,” Westerfield told The Edge.
In September 2023, three months after the County had gone wet, officials changed the zoning ordinance to allow conditional use permits for distilleries in agricultural zones. Shortly after, in addition to the Jacks Creek Road location, another conditional use permit application was requested for The Palisades, a distillery to be built by California-based Near Bridge LLC, on Lexington Road near the river.
The Palisades permit also was at first tabled following public outcry, then approved three months later.
The following January, the state’s Tourism Development Cabinet Finance Administration received plans for the Jacks Creek Road distillery, and by the end of 2024, had ordered a study be conducted on the “entertainment facility” and its potential financial impact on the Commonwealth.
Guv’s hard sell on hard liquor
Bourbon tourism is a declared part of Governor Andy Beshear’s aggressive economic agenda for the state. The governor promotes the industry hard, and has welcomed several new distillery projects during his administration.
This despite hard times for Bourbon. In January, Brown-Forman, maker of Woodford Reserve, among other labels, axed hundreds of workers. Just last month, Luca Mariano Distillery in Danville announced it is 25 million dollars in the hole. Several other distilleries are also struggling, including Green River Distilling which cut a quarter of its workforce this year, and Diageo, maker of Bulleit Bourbon, which paused production at its Lebanon plant earlier this year.
The Commonwealth’s biggest Bourbon story to go down on Beshear’s watch, however, is one that in short order turned out to be a 250 million dollar flop in Garrard County.
When it opened in January last year, Beshear said that the Garrard County Distilling Co. was “a testament to the worldwide appeal of Bourbon from our great Commonwealth” and a welcome addition to “Kentucky’s booming tourism sector.”
The Atlanta-based Staghorn-owned distillery, which also gained approval to build right on the heels of Garrard County’s new wet law going into effect, turned belly up after only 14 months, with various media reports of there having been poor management and too little experience making whiskey at the heart of the debacle.
The state-of-the-art Lancaster facility, and the hundreds of thousands of barrels of whiskey inside it are still in receivership, as multiple law suits against Staghorn and its associates are addressed and bankruptcy weighs heavy as Truist bank demands repayment of its 26 million dollar loan.
Whether it’s due to tariff retaliations, or a generation of drinkers not fond of brown liquors, the Wall Street Journal earlier this year analyzed Bourbon’s performance over the past several years and declared, “The Bourbon boom is over.”
In addition to wondering how much influence Beshear’s office had over the distillery at Jacks Creek Road, Westerfield believes Beshear’s global push to attract tourists is part of a larger personal aim. “He’s just using all of this to run for president,” she said. Of Beshear’s branding of the state as “Your New Kentucky Home” she asks, “At what price does that come to those of us just trying to enjoy our Kentucky home as it is?”
The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Trending statewide
Westerfield said that while the co-founding group is small at four persons, the support from all those on social media has really helped create a grassroots momentum against not just the distillery, but rapid growth overall in the County where several large industrial park projects and housing subdivisions are either underway, or in the planning stages.
Westerfield also said that members of the group are growing more educated about land use and are teaming up with citizens groups across the state who are also concerned about the rapid industrialization of farmland and eminent domain cases.
The groups collaborate with one another to help strengthen each other’s respective causes by sharing the latest happenings in land use, and the best practices for organizing, according to Westerfield.
For example, a group from Grant County alerted Preserve Madison County to how distilleries bring with them whiskey fungus (Baudoinia compniacensis), an organism that lives off the ethanol vapors produced during the distilling process. It is considered a harmless nuisance, causing thick, moist black growth, mostly on buildings and trees, but the group has been including warnings about the fungus in its public outreach. To date, Madison County is not known to have whiskey fungus.
The groups are kindred in that they aim to prevent the rapid and ever faster loss of farmland in Kentucky. Earlier this summer, the state’s Farm Bureau announced that the Commonwealth is losing 12 acres of farmland an hour.
“It’s such an insane number,” Westerfield said. “That’s why what we’re doing is not about just stopping a distillery from coming here. What we want is for the County to slow down. Prioritize smart, responsible development. Growth should not mean we have to sacrifice farmland and natural resources.”
‘Still rural’
According to Fiscal Court Judge Executive Reagan Taylor, Madison County has plenty of farmland to spare.
In a sit down interview at the Fiscal Court, Taylor told The Edge that in response to claims the County is growing too fast, he asked the County’s GIS [geographic information system] department to analyze the amounts of various types of acreage there exist countywide.
“It’s like, we’re 259,000 acres wide as a county, and of that, 237,000 acres are still farmland, that’s 83 percent of our county is agriculture,” Taylor said. “And that’s in the history of Madison County. We’ve been here since 1786 and that’s all we’ve developed.”
Additional statistics Taylor cited are that there are 2,000 acres of industry in the county, and that Richmond takes up 12,000 acres and Berea encompasses 10,000 acres.
Taylor said that he isn’t taking out ads in papers and television in other places saying, “Come to Madison County,” but that the growth citizens are concerned about is inevitable in large part because we are along an interstate highway.
That there are no ads placed by the County is technically true, but The Edge noted to Taylor that the County does participate in CommerceLex, paying one dollar per every 99,000 citizens of the County to the nonprofit that markets the County as part of the Bluegrass region, to potential industries looking to relocate or start-up here.
“If you didn’t want a growing community then you shouldn’t be next to the second largest city in the state of Kentucky,” Taylor said. “Metropolitan areas like Lexington grow out. Why don’t people move to Jackson County? They move here because they want the conveniences of being near to Lexington. A county like Madison that is next to a large metropolitan area and has an interstate is gonna grow quicker than one that doesn’t.”
“These people also live in subdivisions, these people who are upset,” Taylor said. “But they don’t want nobody else to live in a subdivision.”
Taylor also explained that one reason he supports the industrial growth in the County is because he believes having jobs will buffer Madison County from becoming a bedroom community to Lexington’s job market. “If we have the jobs, people will think about staying here,’ Taylor said.
“Taylor is right,” Westerfield said. “People do move to Madison County because they like the convenience of Lexington. That's the thing though, they like the convenience of Lexington, but are choosing not to live in Lexington.”
Westerfield said she is not against people living in subdivisions or against any development per se, but that it happens too fast, and without much public input.
“No one asked us if we would like an industrial distillery right in the middle of our community, but we’re getting one. We went to the meetings, trusted the process, presented the information, but they voted to permit the distillery anyway,” Westerfield said. “We do not feel heard by this county government.”
Case dismissed
When Westerfield and her compatriots came before the County’s Chief Circuit Court Judge Cole Adams Maier last year, the judge dismissed the case, ruling that it was not within her jurisdiction, surprising Preserve Madison County’s lawyer.
“From the onset, he said that we had a case but he never promised we would win,” Westerfield said. “Early on he gave potential scenarios, and not even having our case heard didn’t seem like an option he ever expected. He said he’d never heard a judge say they didn’t have jurisdiction.” The ruling stoked the groups suspicions about influence from outside the County.
Along with the dismissal went a countersuit filed by Jenkins and McFadden claiming Preserve Madison County had slandered them.
Westerfield and the others decided to file an appeal. They are still awaiting a response, but Westerfield said by now, seeing how no ground has been broken on the future site of the distillery, maybe the developers are less sure of their case.
“We’d rather just let it drag out at this point,” she said.
A request for comment from McFadden’s office went unanswered.
The Edge is Madison County’s source for thorough land use coverage. Become a paid subscriber and never miss a report.
This year’s schedule:
Thursday, 8/14
7:00 PM: Opening night at Honeysuckle Bourbon House featuring
John Skelton, Rebecca Baumbach, Skip Cleavinger, John Mock and Ruby. Admission $10.
Friday, 8/15
1:00 PM: Randy Clepper, John Sherman, Bella Issakova at The Kentucky Artisan Center.
2:00 PM; Private concert at BCHS with Dogwood Road.
6:15 PM: Songs of Ireland w/ Kathy T. Schneider at Taleless Dog Booksellers,
Center St.
7:30 PM: Concert at Russel Acton Folk Center, Jefferson St. featuring John Walsh/Mark Rosenthal, Mark Brown, Dogwood Road, Over The Mountain, Bella Issakova/Randy Clepper/John Sherman, Jil Chambless/Dan Vogt.
10:00 PM: Session for all musicians at the folk center.
Saturday, 8/16
11:00 AM – 5:30 PM: Sessions at the Boone Tavern Garden, Short St. Session leaders: Walsh/Rosenthal, Penzien/Payne, Cleavinger/Baumbach, Issakova/Clepper/Sherman, Boylan/Jones, Atwater/Donnelly, Mast/Balcom.
1:00 PM: Jil Chambless and Dan Vogt at Top Drawer Gallery, N. Broadway.
1:00 PM: Jeni Balcom and Doug Mast live at Kentucky Artisan Center.
2:00 PM: Dogwood Road at Taleless Dog Booksellers.
1:00 PM – 5:00 PM: Four excellent presentations at Cowan Chapel, Union Church, Prospect St. Each presentation $5. Four presentations $15.
1:00 PM: Aubrey Atwater, Elwood Donnelly – Songs from the Isles.
2:00 PM: John Skelton – pipes and flutes.
3:00 PM: Clepper, Sherman, Issakova – Modern Trad.
4:00 PM: Mark Rosenthal. John Walsh - Bouzouki, guitar, etc.
1:30 PM: Bodhran workshop with Jeremy Wade and Justin Bridges. $5.
3:15 PM: Irish Ceili (dance workshop) with Amelie Maniscalco. $5.
Both at the Folk Center, Jefferson St.
7:00 PM: Justin Bridges, Jeremy Wade at the Union Church entrance.
7:30 PM: Celtic Celebration Concert at Union Church. $20.
Performers include: Cathy Tully Schneider, Turlach Boylan, Eddie Jones, Skip Cleavinger, Rebecca Baumach, John Mock, Mark Rosenthal, John Walsh, Jeni Balcom, Doug Mast, Randy Clepper, Bella Issakova, John Sherman, Aubrey Atwater, Elwood Donnelly, John Skelton, Over The Mountain.
Sunday 8/17
10:30 AM: Celtic inspired servicer at Union Church with Jeni Balcom on Irish harp.
12:00 PM: Jeni Balcom on Irish Harp and Doug Mast on concertina at the Boone Tavern
1:00 PM: Jil Chambles and Dan Voigt live at Kentucky Artisan Center.
For more information: www.berea-celtic.org
The Celtic Fest is a sponsor of The Edge, so I hope you will support Sune and the nearly 200 musicians who will come to play, laugh, and perform at this year’s festival.