Understanding how Kentucky’s distillers transformed their craft into an industry during the nineteenth century is abetted by a landscape ecology perspective which considers process (how things are made), pattern (the forms produced by physical, social, and economic processes), and place (creation of distinctive places).  The contemporary distilling industry operates in a landscape that includes residuals of nineteenth-century precursors which are often used in marketing and promotion.  A review of the geographical history and ecology of distilling will relate the conjunctions between physical environment, agriculture, invention and innovation, transportation—roads, rivers, and rails—and the industrialization process.  A study of two distilleries, Elkhorn Distillery in Scott County and the Henry McKenna Distillery in Nelson County provides an illustration of the craft-to-industry transformation.  One distillery enjoyed long-term success, the other failed soon after operations began. 

Karl Raitz is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Kentucky and author of Bourbon's Backroads: A Journey through Kentucky's Distilling Landscape. He is coeditor of The Great Valley Road of Virginia: Shenandoah Landscapes from Prehistory to the Present and coauthor of Rock Fences of the Bluegrass.