Sometime around mid-April, bourbon enthusiasts across the country — and apparently fifteen foreign countries — set reminders, opened browser tabs, and waited for a link to go live. By the time the dust settled, VIP tickets to the 2026 Kentucky Bourbon Festival were gone in just under four minutes. General admission followed within 48 hours. The same story has played out four years running.
So what’s actually happening in Bardstown, Kentucky, every September? And how did a festival that started with nine distilleries in 2019 become the event that the bourbon world didn’t know it was missing? Randy Prasse, the Director of the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, joined me this week to answer exactly that.
Distilleries First, Everything Else Second
The framework Randy uses to explain KBF’s growth is deceptively simple: take care of the distilleries, and the enthusiasts will follow. It sounds obvious, but it represents a break from how many events in this space still work. When Randy reimagined the festival between 2019 and 2021, he made a deliberate bet: give the distilleries what they need to show up in a meaningful way, and they’ll keep showing up. So far, he hasn’t been wrong.
The introduction of on-site bottle sales was the inflection point. Randy describes what it did for small craft distilleries in terms that are hard to argue with — for some of them, a three-day window of being in front of several thousand pre-qualified bourbon enthusiasts ready to spend money was the difference between a profitable year and a very difficult one. What started as optional is now essentially mandatory for any distillery that legally can sell. And the consumers who come know it. They’re not just there to sip; they’re there to buy things they can’t get anywhere else.
“The bourbon festival has become the consumer electronics show for bourbon,” Randy told me. “Distilleries are either rebranding altogether or bringing new products to market starting with the festival.”
Lawrenceburg rebranded to Larrkin on the festival grounds. Dark Arts debuted to lines that rivaled Heaven Hill. EJ Curly was essentially unknown when the first modern KBF ran — and walked away as one of the most talked-about booths of the weekend. That unpredictability, Randy says, is a feature, not a bug.
The Line Problem (And the Very Deliberate Fix)
Ask anyone who has attended KBF in the last couple of years about the experience and eventually the conversation turns to lines. Randy doesn’t deflect from it. He’s spent a significant part of this off-season in direct meetings with the top distilleries specifically about line management — how to communicate better with people about what’s available, how to keep someone from standing in a 45-minute queue only to be told they missed the last bottle, and how to build in more moments of controlled anticipation rather than a free-for-all at 11 AM when VIP opens.
Staggered releases may be experimented with this year. Better front-of-house communication is a priority. And Randy draws a useful distinction: the lines aren’t a problem to eliminate, because waiting is a recognized part of bourbon culture. The problem is uninformed disappointment. Those are two very different experiences, and fixing the second one doesn’t require eliminating the first.
New Riff, the Featured Distillery, and the Bill Samuels Origin Story
The 2026 Featured Distillery is New Riff — which feels perfectly timed given that they just took home World’s Best Bourbon at the World Whiskies Awards. The story of how the Featured Distillery program exists at all is worth telling.
It started with Bill Samuels donating a barrel during COVID, before the re-imagined festival had even run its first event. He believed in what Randy was building, wanted to support it, and handed over a barrel’s worth of bourbon for the festival to bottle and sell. Randy’s honest admission that he didn’t quite know what to do with a barrel of bourbon — “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” — is one of the better moments in the conversation. But from that gesture came a single barrel program, a VIP bottle inclusion, and eventually the full Featured Distillery experience: a named cocktail, the distiller’s dinner, elevated prominence on the grounds.
New Riff started at KBF in a 10-by-10 craft tent. They’ve been there since nearly the beginning. Watching them grow into a world-recognized brand, and then celebrating that by handing them the featured distillery platform, is exactly the kind of story the festival was built to produce.
The Part Nobody Sees
Bardstown has a population of roughly 13,000 people. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival effectively doubles it for a long weekend. You are, by most measures, temporarily building a small city in the grounds of Spalding Hall — a venue that shares its footprint with a Catholic church, a city hall, two schools, and streets that have to keep functioning for people who live there.
Randy talks about this with a seriousness that I think gets underappreciated from the outside. The eight-day setup. The three-day teardown. The $10,000 in overseeding and power-washing to restore the grounds afterward. The security perimeter that went up a full block around the festival after the industry’s profile grew enough to require it. The volunteer coordinator whose entire job is recruiting the hundred-plus people who show up to help distilleries unload trucks. None of this is visible on a Saturday afternoon when you’re sipping bourbon under the trees — which is exactly how it’s supposed to work.
“If we don’t get it right, we have 361 days until we have another opportunity to do it right.”
What’s Still Available for 2026
If you missed the main ticket window, not everything is gone. Sunday Sampler passes — one-day tickets for the final day of the festival — are still available as of the recording of this episode. Randy’s case for Sunday deserves consideration: it’s a more relaxed pace, the bottle-sale pressure has eased, and it’s an ideal entry point for first-timers or anyone who wants to test-drive the experience before committing to a multi-day weekend in 2027. Add-on premium experiences (culinary events, education sessions, cocktail programming, lockers, shuttles) were going on sale this week for anyone who already holds a ticket. Check kybourbonfestival.com and follow @kybourbonfest on Instagram and Facebook for timing.
The Bigger Picture
Fifteen countries represented in the attendee base in 2025. Eighty-five percent of ticket buyers coming from outside Kentucky. Small craft distilleries crediting the event with saving their year. A 36-year festival industry veteran who still wakes up at 3:30 AM on ticket sale day with a nervous stomach. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival isn’t just a good event. It’s become something more structural to the bourbon industry than that — a marketplace, a debut platform, a community gathering point, and a genuinely compelling reason to spend a September weekend in one of the most beautiful small towns in America.
The full conversation is worth your time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. And if you want more of this — interviews with the people who make, build, and run this industry — subscribe below. Pinkies down.
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