Bardstown Bourbon
Spirited Transparency:
How (matter) leveraged AR to bring the distillery to the tasting room
Founded in 2014, Bardstown Bourbon Company is one of the country’s most modern and technically advanced whiskey distilleries, located in the heart of Bourbon Country on 100 acres of beautiful, active farmland. There, the innovative distillery produces custom rye, whiskey and bourbon for prominent brands through its one-of-a-kind collaborative distilling program. With its first bourbon offering in 2023, the brand received the top score at the International Wine and Spirits Competition and was awarded 2023 ‘Worldwide Whiskey Producer of the Year’.
In 2018, Bardstown Bourbon Company opened the Kitchen & Bar at its Bardstown distillery to create an exceptional destination experience for visitors. Yet, with more than 2 million bourbon fans flocking to Kentucky each year, not everyone makes the pilgrimage from Louisville—the state’s largest city and home to many of its most popular tourist attractions—to Bardstown, some 50 miles south of the city. As Bardstown Bourbon Company CEO Mark Erwin said, “Louisville is really Kentucky’s open arms. House Bill 500, which granted the ability to open a tasting room, made the way for us to educate people about how we’re moving bourbon forward in a distinctly Bardstown Bourbon Co. way, right here in Louisville.”
It was in that spirit (pun intended) that the company decided to open a tasting room experience in Louisville, KY, within the city’s historic Whiskey Row. As a company dedicated to pushing the boundaries of innovation while honoring the traditional art of whiskey-making, Bardstown Bourbon Company wanted the tasting room to deliver a modern bourbon experience, featuring highly interactive education, innovative craft cocktails, augmented reality and immersive digital environments, curated retail merchandise and exclusive bottles.
There was only one problem: How would the tasting room, located in the urban setting of downtown Louisville, help visitors make the emotional connection with the heart of the distillery’s operations in the green, open farmlands of Kentucky’s Bourbon Country? At the same time, Michael Powell (the brand’s creative director) stipulated that the tasting room honor the transparency and collaboration at the core of the company and differentiate it from the “grandpa’s wheat fields” of other bourbon brands by highlighting its commitment to innovation and technology. It was a tall order, indeed, but the (matter) team was eager to accept the challenge.
There was just one small hitch:
The Louisville tasting room hadn’t been designed with a brick wall, meaning we would have to build it ourselves. So, the (matter) team hopped in the car and drove to Bardstown distillery to scout the location, take measurements of the spatial dimensions of the distillery, and choose the brick wall we wanted to recreate in Louisville. And of course, someone had to count the number of bricks. (There were exactly 1,603, by the way).
The entire build was custom, requiring a significant amount of planning and coordinating between software platforms, lots of geometry, and plenty of “measuring twice and cutting once.” As there weren’t pre-existing brick assets, we had to build the bricks and the mortar from scratch and then figure out how to make them spin. Once the major physical construction was finished, we still had to determine how to activate the experience. The brand didn’t want any obvious signage, so we needed to create something subtle. Our solution was a QR code embedded within a piece of art hanging in the space—a clever “Easter Egg” hidden among barrels upon barrels of bourbon.
Our AR experience was activated by more than 250 visitors in the first month alone at Bardstown Bourbon Company’s Louisville tasting room, and use has only continued to grow. We also received a Silver Addy Award (one of the American Advertising Federation’s highest honors) for “Innovative Use of Interactive/Technology.” But the greatest accolade came from Bardstown Bourbon Company Vice President of New Product Development Dan Callaway: “For this space, integrating leading-edge technology and building tasting experiences unlike anything else in the state was the key to [creating a new tradition that celebrates the past while looking into the future]. Bardstown Bourbon Company has the opportunity to speak to a much larger audience in Downtown Louisville and merged the best of design, experience, and storytelling in order to do so.” Cheers!
