The alcohol spill also depleted the oxygen in the river, killing an estimated 228,000 fish along a 66-mile stretch. Businesses and schools were closed because of the water shortage.

Officials ordered water usage restrictions. The river contamination required the temporary shutdown of the water treatment plant. However, an estimated 20% of the whiskey flowed into the Kentucky River. Firefighters saved Lawrenceburg's water treatment plant from destruction. Burning whiskey flowed from the warehouse and setting the woods on fire. It contained more than 17,000 wooden barrels of whiskey. On May 9, 2000, a fire destroyed a seven-story aging warehouse at the company in Anderson County, Kentucky. In 1980, the distillery and the Wild Turkey brand were purchased by Pernod Ricard. In 1971, Austin Nichols purchased the facility, then known as the Boulevard Distillery, and changed the name to the Wild Turkey Distillery. Much of this whiskey was purchased from the Ripys/Gould distillery in Tyrone. įor the next three decades, Austin Nichols remained a non-distiller producer-bottling bourbon purchased on the open market under the Wild Turkey brand. The Ripys were bought out in 1949 by Robert and Alvin Gould. The bourbon proved so popular among his friends they continued to ask him for 'that wild turkey bourbon.' Austin Nichols began to bottle Wild Turkey in 1942. The 'Wild Turkey' brand is said to have arisen after an Austin Nichols executive, Thomas McCarthy, took some warehouse samples on a wild turkey hunting trip in 1940.

Austin Nichols was one of these wholesalers. The Ripys sold the bourbon produced at this distillery to various wholesalers who bottled bourbon under their own brands. After Prohibition, the Ripy family (Thomas had died in 1902) rebuilt the distillery and began to again produce bourbon. In 1891, Thomas Ripy built the Old Hickory Distillery in Tyrone, Kentucky, near Lawrenceburg, on the former site of the Old Moore Distillery. It offers tours and is part of the American Whiskey Trail and the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. The distillery is located near Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. Wild Turkey is a brand of Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey distilled and bottled by the Wild Turkey Distilling Co, a division of Campari Group.

Wild turkey whiskey ingredients