Field Trips: Holladay Distilling Company In Weston, Missouri

A visit to the Holladay Distilling Company offers an opportunity to step back in time and to celebrate the current resurgence of bourbon. 

The History of Holladay Distilling Company

In 1856, Stagecoach King and Pony Express Founder Ben Holladay opened a distillery in Weston, Missouri, Holladay was what today would be called a “serial entrepreneur.” He was born in Kentucky, Nicholas County to be exact, and together with his brother moved out West when Missouri was the absolute edge of civilization. When they settled in Weston, a river town on the banks of the Missouri River at the time, they found limestone aquifers. As Kentucky boys, they knew exactly what to do next.

The site was an operational slaughterhouse and meat packing plant by the time Ben and David Holladay arrived, so the facilities were already established. Ben left the distillery in the care of his brother, David, to go start other businesses, and by 1864 he was the largest private employer in the United States. Unfortunately, the risks of opening new markets and new businesses would prove too challenging to sustain, and Holladay died poor, after a stock market collapse, and relatively unknown in Portland, Oregon.

The distillery in Weston has continued to operate through many changes in ownership. In 1942 it was renamed the McCormick Distilling Company and in 1996 it was acquired by the current owners. By that time bourbon had not been produced on site for about a decade, but there were still plenty of barrels of it aging in the patent warehouses on the site. That whiskey tragically was bottled as a bottom-shelf product at a time when no one was buying bourbon.

The oldest warehouse still standing on the property is a little over 120 years old, and the bottom floors of it have been converted into office space. Barrels still rest on the top floors of the structure that once held 2000 barrels. The other rickhouses are considerably larger and have been slowly filling with barrels of whiskey.

In 2016 bourbon began flowing at this 167 year-old distillery once again. There was an attempt made to bring the old equipment back online — the still had been purchased from Maker’s Mark decades before — but it was too far gone after more than 30 years of sitting idle. So an entirely new distillery was equipped, complete with newly-commissioned stills from Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Louisville, Kentucky.

McCormick Distilling Company, rebranded as Holladay Distilling Company, released its first Bourbon of the modern era in 2022, a six year-old Bottled-in-Bond, following the known recipe of the Bourbon that had once been made onsite.

Visiting Holladay Distilling Company

Structured tours are relatively new at Holladay Distilling Company, though locals once treated the site like a local park. At one point in time, it was the place to be on weekends in the tiny town of Weston, which froze in time after a major flood of the Missouri River shifted the river’s path away from the once bustling town. People would stop by McCormick Distilling Company’s general store to buy snacks and beverages and picnic onsite or play cards in the manmade cave that was likely built to cool and store meat back in the site’s meatpacking days. Even when the distillery’s market share began to shrink and the management closed the site to visitors, McCormick on Main was opened up as a way to ensure the locals could still get their cheap vodka and sundries.

Tours 

Today, tours begin at the house atop the hill at 1 McCormick Ln, visible from the County Road. The visitor center has a tasting bar complete with cocktails, a second tasting bar for tour tastings, a small gift shop, and a large lounge area. This facility doubles as a hangout spot for people who attend more informal events on the grounds, such as the distillery’s recent adult Easter egg hunt.

A tour bus takes guests through the security gate and into the center of the activity. There are rickhouses that have been there anywhere from 120+ years to 60-70 years, all containing the original patented ricking systems that have been there since construction. There’s a manmade cave, which has only recently been converted to a bonded warehouse with a small tasting bar for experimental projects. In the corner of the cave by the door is one of the original springs that made the location attractive to the Holladay brothers.

Across a small footbridge is an event space where Holladay hosts programs including Meet the Masters, corporate retreats, and more. There’s a small bottling line in the event building especially for smaller runs like “one barrel Bourbons” as they like to call single barrels at Holladay Distilling.

Notably, a humble screened-in porch area adjacent to the distillery building boasts a massive spring-fed well that was originally used to source the water for the bourbon in the days of the Holladay brothers. When the current team began excavation, it was under a concrete floor with a tiny trap door in it. Employees who’d been working at the site for decades said when they opened the trap door they could hear water rushing beneath the floors, but not much was known about what was actually down there. Excavations revealed a masonry and limestone-lined well that was still being fed by the underground aquifers that supplied it over a hundred years ago.

The Stillhouse 

The stillhouse is typically what most tourists are most interested in. A column still and stainless mash tubs work at a fraction of their intended capacity to produce 14 barrels of whiskey a day, but at 24-7 capacity the distillery could produce 15,000 barrels of whiskey a year. Barrel entry proof is typically 118. Yeast is commercially sourced. The entry into the stillhouse overlooks the cistern room where barrels are filled.

The rickhouses look like they were airlifted from Kentucky. The wooden ricking, while it has been stabilized, is original to each building. The oldest building is four floors, while the newer buildings are six and seven, respectively. A little creek bed runs through the middle of the distillery grounds.

Tours are currently available Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Holladay Distilling Company Bourbons

Currently, Holladay Distilling’s whiskey portfolio is all bourbon, but that isn’t set in stone. The first product released last year was a 6-year bottled-in-Bond bourbon with a traditional mash bill containing rye as the flavoring grain. That was followed by a barrel-proof version of the same. In March of 2023 a wheated bourbon with a mash bill of 73% corn, 15% soft red wheat, and 12% malted barley was released, also as a Bottled-in-Bond Bourbon. One barrel bourbons as well as experimental products are released intermittently. 

While rye whiskey has not traditionally been made at Holladay Distilling Company’s 167-year-old site, it hasn’t been completely ruled out yet. As demand grows for Ben Holladay Bourbon, it’s possible that Master Distiller Kyle Merklein could be persuaded to lay down a few barrels.

The “one barrel” program is somewhat unique, in that in order to choose a single barrel Bourbon from Holladay Distilling Company it must be chosen on site. Holladay will not do picks on behalf of stores, nor will they ship tasting kits or samples to be chosen offsite. Single barrel Bourbons must be chosen onsite with the full Holladay Distilling Company experience. And really, who wouldn’t love checking out this historic distilling locale?

The history of the Holladay Distilling Company doesn’t sink in until visitors are onsite. There’s an amazing amount of history that feels like it belongs in Kentucky and seems out of place in the westernmost border of Missouri, and that’s what makes Holladay worth the trip.