Neeley

Royce Neeley is the eleventh generation of his family to distill. The line runs back to 1740, when James Neeley landed from Northern Ireland carrying copper pot stills. Generations of them made whiskey off the books in the Kentucky hills. Royce and his father Roy went legal in 2015 and opened in Sparta in July 2017.

They kept the moonshiner's methods. Everything is triple pot distilled through a thumper, sweet mashed, and fermented in open top cypress with yeast propagated on site. Output is two 53 gallon barrels a day, so every bottle comes off a working farm still rather than a production line. Family owned, distilled on site.