THE ROAD TO WILDERNESS
TRAIL
Banding together
Shane Baker and Pat Heist first met as students at the University of Kentucky. Then they started a rock band together. Sure, it was fun. But bills have a way of needing to be paid. They both agreed it was time to chase another dream.
FERMENTING A PASSION
After earning their respective degrees in mechanical engineering and plant pathology, Shane and Dr. Pat founded Ferm Solutions, a one-stop-shop fermentation consulting company. They helped build countless distilleries and other fermentation-focused operations, earning them the title “the science guys of bourbon.”
LAUNCHING IN THE CITY OF FIRSTS
Shane and Dr. Pat founded Wilderness Trail Distillery in Danville, Kentucky, a town locals know as “the City of Firsts.” The state-of-the-art distillery—Danville’s first legal distillery since Prohibition—sits along the Wilderness Trace, a historic region through which the great American explorer Daniel Boone blazed a trail in the 1700s. Danville built on Boone’s pioneering legacy as Kentucky’s first capital city, the home to the first courthouse in the state, and the “Birthplace of Bluegrass.”
A fitting hometown for a downright radical operation.
MATURING OUR REPUTATION
Wilderness Trail Distillery was named Kentucky Manufacturer of the Year in 2016. We bottled and sold the first batches of our three core whiskeys in 2018, with our flagship offering becoming the first bottled-in-bond, wheated, sweet mash bourbon to be released in Kentucky since Prohibition.
Soon after, we joined the ranks of the state’s most elite bourbon producers when we were named the official 18th stop on the historic Kentucky Bourbon Trail in 2020.
OPTIMIZING OLD-WORLD TRADITIONS
Today, the Wilderness Trail Distillery is a model of innovation and efficiency in American craft whiskey and home to more than 100,000 barrels aging in rickhouses across our 168-acre campus.
In an industry that lives and dies by the old ways of its ancestors, we’re proud to be blazing trails into the future and bringing expert-backed, unconventional thinking to our craft.