Castle & Key's story begins in 1887, when Colonel E.H. Taylor Jr. — the same Taylor whose name now adorns a line of Buffalo Trace bourbons — built his Old Taylor Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky. The site became famous for its castle-like stillhouse, its classical springhouse, and the sunken garden Taylor laid out around them. By the late twentieth century it had fallen silent, and for decades the buildings stood abandoned, draped in ivy and slowly returning to the earth.
In 2014 Will Arvin and Wes Murry bought the ruin and set about what became one of the most ambitious restorations in American whiskey history, bringing the distillery back to life as Castle & Key. Marianne Eaves, the first female master distiller in Kentucky since Prohibition, oversaw the laying down of the first new spirit in 2016. Restoration Rye, released as the brand's first rye whiskey, is a direct fruit of that revival.
The mash bill leans on rye with malted barley and corn in support, and the whiskey is bottled at 51 percent ABV — high enough to carry weight, low enough to keep the floral side of the spirit in view. That floral character is the house signature: a bright, minty, almost garden-like lift that seems to echo the restored sunken garden outside the stillhouse. It is an evocative rye, tied unmistakably to its place, and a fitting first chapter for a distillery that was rescued from silence.
