HAVING WORK DONE: Business in downtown Louisville yesterday took me past the Fort Nelson Building, which is being restored by Michter’s as the site of a boutique bourbon distillery. The building is beautiful, but it needs a lot of work. Kudos to the company for saving a historic structure along Louisville’s Whiskey Row for its new enterprise.

Inspired by the storied history and recent resurgence of Louisville’s Whiskey Row, Kevin Yates and Katie Kelty, who met while both were students at Bellarmine University, have started a new line of products that celebrate that heritage: Bourbon Built.

Their high-quality T-shirts (most $24) feature archival images of city scenes and are printed right here in Louisville. I purchased the shirt that shows a streetcar navigating Market Street circa 1900-1910. Another design depicts the elaborate fire escapes of brick buildings along Main Street. More designs are in the works.

Also available: a set of four coasters ($9) that say, “With a splash of water,” printed by Hound Dog Press of Louisville.

“We are just two college friends who wanted to show our love of this great city, its history and its connection to that Southern elixir of the gods,” Kelty says.

Place your order here. Bourbon Built is also on Facebook and Twitter.

Louisville is getting serious about reclaiming its bourbon heritage. Today, Heaven Hill Distilleries, the largest independent family-owned and -operated distilled spirits supplier in the United States, announced plans for a new artisanal pot-still distillery and interactive tourism experience at its 528 Main St. office along Louisville’s historic “Whiskey Row.”

Work on the multimillion-dollar Evan Williams Bourbon Experience is to begin June 15 with a projected opening date of September 2013, in time for Bourbon Heritage Month, distillery officials announced at a standing-room-only news conference with Lt. Gov. Jerry Abramson and Mayor Greg Fischer. In attendance were several members of the Shapira family and Parker and Craig Beam, Heaven Hill’s father-and-son master distillers. 

The Evan Williams Bourbon Experience will include an interactive exhibit on distilling, a Whiskey Row-themed tasting room, a retail store and a “speakeasy”-themed banquet room. Its facade will be dominated by a dramatic five-story Evan Williams bottle that will become three dimensional in the two lower floors and form a “bourbon fountain” in the lobby.

The attraction is named for Heaven Hill’s flagship bourbon brand, which in turn is named for “Kentucky’s First Distiller,” a Welsh immigrant who built his commercial distillery at what is now Sixth Street at the Ohio River in 1783. Evan Williams was also a city trustee known to bring a jug of his finest to trustee meetings and Louisville’s harbormaster - a job with a lot of power in the days when the city was the major shipping port for whiskey headed to New Orleans and other points south. Visitors to the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience will be able to view exhibits that recreate his original distillery.

“We welcome back ‘the spirit’ of Evan Williams,” Heaven Hill executive VP Harry Shapira said.

Heaven Hill knows how to build a tourism destination. Its gorgeous Bourbon Heritage Center, with a bourbon-barrel-shaped tasting room, draws more than 60,000 people per year to Nelson County, where the company has its headquarters, warehousing and bottling operations. Its bourbon and whiskeys are produced at the Bernheim Distillery in Louisville. Like the Heritage Center, the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience was designed by Solid Light Inc. of Louisville (president Cynthia Torp is a founding member of the Bourbon Women Association).

The Heaven Hill project is the latest in a series of projects celebrating Louisville’s “urban bourbon” heritage. Michter’s plans to open a boutique distillery in the Old Fort Nelson Building at Eighth and Main, about two blocks west of the Heaven Hill site. Last year, Four Roses partnered with BBC to open the Four Roses Bourbon Barrel Loft at 300 W. Main, which has a view of the Whiskey Row Lofts in the 100 block, where other former distillery-related buildings are being rehabbed into restaurants and bars. 

Mayor Fischer called the Heaven Hill project “another exclamation point” on Louisville’s food and beverage industry. “We call bourbon a food group around here,” he said to laughter.

Admission to the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience is projected to be $10 for adults, $9 for seniors and $5 for children under 21.

(Rendering courtesy of Solid Light)

Students from the Yale School of Architecture are coming to Louisville to research a project on designing a contemporary urban bourbon distillery. They will study Louisville’s Whiskey Row and visit area distilleries including Woodford Reserve and Four Roses.

Read more about the project in a Courier-Journal story here.

The cost will be “significant,” but most of the deteriorating buildings in the 100 block of Louisville’s West Main Street - known as “Whiskey Row” during the city’s heyday as the capital of the bourbon-shipping world - can be saved, investors said in a story in yesterday’s Courier-Journal.

The investors, led by Brown-Forman heiress Laura Lee Brown and her husband, Steve Wilson, hope to have the first tenant in by the end of 2013. They haven’t specified how the five buildings will be used, but they hope to have at least one bourbon-related concern involved.

Read more about the project here.

Photo: Preservation Louisville Inc.

Did you know that at the turn of the 20th century, Louisville, Ky., was the nexus of the bourbon industry? At one point, the River City’s Whiskey Row was home to nearly 90 whiskey-related concerns from all over the world. Read more about Whiskey Row’s fascinating history, precipitous decline and burgeoning renaissance in my story in the fall issue of The Bourbon Review, in stores now. Or, subscribe here.

Louisville’s Hometown Heroes program honored Brown-Forman founder George Garvin Brown on Tuesday, Sept. 6, with the unveiling of this three-story mural at 122 W. Main St., in the heart of what was once Louisville’s Whiskey Row. Brown was the first distiller to bottle his bourbon, Old Forester — the only bourbon to be produced before, during and after Prohibition.

Read The Courier-Journal’s story about the mural here.