In 1996, the distiller’s worst nightmare came true when Warehouse I at Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown caught fire. Within four hours of the call to the fire station, seven warehouses holding 90,000 barrels of aging bourbon, each one containing forty-five gallons, were burning out of control. With flames leaping as high as 35 stories, firefighters abandoned attempts to extinguish the fire and turned their efforts instead toward protecting the remaining 37 warehouses. A storm front was moving through the area with northwesterly winds of 50 mph and gusts of up to 75 mph.

Warehouse J went from ten percent involvement to ninety percent in less than three minutes. And as the warehouses collapsed, the whiskey flowed. “When that fire started laying down on the ground, it was really a run for your life situation,” said one of the firefighters. An 18-inch deep flood of flaming bourbon covered the main road linking the warehouses with the distillery building downhill. Rivers of fire covered the surrounding 40 acres, spilling into the creek and riding the water like so many dancing ghosts.

Finally the storm opened up with a downpour and nature helped end what she might have started with a bolt of lightening, but the cause remains undetermined. The early morning light revealed smoldering, flattened rubble where the seven-story, 100-by-200 foot warehouses had stood the day before. All Heaven Hill employees reported to work as usual and the bottling, processing, shipping and distribution facilities operated at full capacity.

According to a news release from the Kentucky Farm Bureau, the loss of the Bardstown distillery impacted farmers all over Nelson County who had depended on the spent mash as nutrient-rich, low-cost feed for their stock. One farmer claimed his production had dropped by 500 pounds of milk a day without the high protein feed to which his cows had grown accustomed.

In 2000, a fire at Wild Turkey distillery in Lawrenceburg destroyed a seven-story warehouse holding nearly a million gallons of bourbon in 17,200 barrels, and sent flaming bourbon coursing into the Kentucky River, killing fish and setting fire to woods. Then in August of 2003 lightening sparked a fire that engulfed a seven-story warehouse at Jim Beam, sending flames more than 100 feet in the air before the warehouse collapsed two hours after the fire was reported. About 19,000 barrels of bourbon, or less than 2 percent of its bourbon inventory, were lost. Flaming bourbon from the warehouse ran off into a nearby creek, also resulting in a large fish kill.

Since the state bills distilleries for every dead fish—50 cents for a bass and up to $5.00 for the more exotic species— many distillers have built berms around their warehouses to contain the fire should such misfortune fall their way.