Business View Magazine | February 2018

242 243 When we get the brown signs up and start getting all of these tourists in, next year,we’ll probably get 100 or 150 thousand. But it will definitely bring people here.And they’ll want to come to a small distillery like this because you can actually talk to the master distiller, you can see the mash as it’s being made, you can smell it, you can look at it, you can see the whole distilling process, and just get a real close-up look at it. So,we think that’s going to be very attractive. “Once they get here,we’ll show themwhat else there is to see.Here, in Radcliff,we have a place called Saunders Springs,where there used to be a 1830s gristmill.You go down a winding road and come to this beautiful cave spring that comes out of the side of the hill and the water flows there 365 days a year.This kind of limestone water is perfect for making bourbon. During prohibition,moon- have,which is flat land, a railroad, an interstate, and water. So,we’re not going to attract anything like that.”What Radcliff does have, however, once again, is Bourbon. “I had an opportunity about two years ago to attract a craft, bourbon distillery to our city. I had a vacant building that I leased to them, and I did that because I think bourbon has gone worldwide,” Weaver continues.“In fact,when I was in Turkey, about six years ago, I was invited to attend a ses- sion of their parliament, because I had been a state legislator,myself, and when that session was over, one of the members of parliament came up to me and proudly reached in his wallet and showed me his ‘bourbon passport,’ and told me about all the distilleries he had visited and where he would like to visit in the future.”This chance meeting helped convince Weaver that there was a tourist market out there, ready and willing to make the trek to the home of American-made Bourbon,which, of course, is Kentucky,USA. “This little distillery that we have is called Bound- ary Oak. It’s going to have the brown signs that advertise the Bourbon Trail on the main interstate, which is I-65, and this little place is nine miles away from that.We probably got 35,000 visitors, this year. RADCLIFF, KENTUCKY