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Lexington Herald-Leader
Lexington Herald-Leader
Will Jim Beam distill next year in Clermont? The latest on Kentucky's bourbon giant
Major Kentucky distillery Jim Beam, which stunned the world in December 2025 b y closing its Clermont distillery for a year , plans to keep it offline at least through 2027. “We’re going to continue to have distillation paused at our Clermont distillery,” said Suntory president and CEO Greg Hughes in an interview with the Herald-Leader. “But Clermont remains a very active part of our Kentucky operations.” The campus, which has been the bourbon brand’s home just outside of Bardstown for 90 years, continues to operate tours and visitor experiences as well as bottling, aging, warehousing and other daily activities. But the bulk of distilling shifted to the larger industrial Booker Noe distillery in Boston. Hughes said that after a $400 million expansion there a few years ago that increased distilling capacity by 50%, Beam was able to meet current distilling demands there while making improvements at the Clermont site. They’d originally planned to reopen sooner and still will someday. “We’ll move back at some point to distilling at Clermont,” he said. “If demand accelerates dramatically, we have the flexibility to go back into production at Clermont. Obviously, we need to get the infrastructure improvements made, which will take us