From the Peppers and Labrot & Graham to Brown-Forman.

Woodford Reserve is a small-batch Kentucky straight bourbon made by Brown-Forman at the Woodford Reserve Distillery in Woodford County, about eight miles from the town of Versailles in north-central Kentucky. The brand is young; the site is not. English Wikipedia, citing the National Park Service’s landmark nomination, says distilling began there in 1812, and the main stone building, put up in 1838, is among the oldest distillery buildings in Kentucky.

The distillery was established by Elijah Pepper and passed to his son Oscar, when it was known as the Oscar Pepper Distillery. In the mid-nineteenth century James C. Crow worked there, and the nomination credits him with work that improved and codified sour-mash fermentation, pot-still distillation and barrel ageing. In 1867 the property passed to Oscar Pepper’s son James E. Pepper, and in 1878 the family sold it to Leopold Labrot and James Graham, whose names it carried for more than a century.

Brown-Forman bought the distillery in 1941, English Wikipedia says, ran it until the late 1960s and then sold the property to a local farmer. It bought the site back in 1993, restored it and returned it to production, and launched the Woodford Reserve brand in 1996. The distillery itself was renamed Woodford Reserve Distillery in 2004, according to Chester Zoeller’s 2009 history Bourbon in Kentucky. The grounds were added to the National Register of Historic Places in November 1995 and designated a National Historic Landmark in May 2000, as Labrot and Graham’s Old Oscar Pepper Distillery.

The whiskey combines two kinds of spirit: copper pot-still spirit made at Woodford and column-still spirit from Brown-Forman’s distillery in Shively, Kentucky, DrinkSpirits reported in 2012. English Wikipedia says each bottle carries its own batch and bottle number.

Copper foil, a numbered label and a horse race.

Brown-Forman treats the bottle as the core of the brand. When the company announced a redesign across the Woodford Reserve family in December 2016, Mark Bacon, then global brand director, said the brand had redefined the category at its launch twenty years earlier “in a disruptive package,” Distillery Trail reported. The update brought subtle changes to bottle structures and cork closures and new labels with high-quality paper, copper foil and matte finishes. The biggest change was for Double Oaked, which had shared the standard bottle: it gained a stand-alone design with an offset wrap-around label, and Chris Hungerford, Brown-Forman’s vice president of global design, described a shorter, wider glass structure with a heavy base that echoed the shoulders of the classic Woodford bottle.

The brand’s other great canvas is the Kentucky Derby. Churchill Downs said in January 2023 that Woodford Reserve had been the Official Bourbon of the Kentucky Derby since 1999 and the race’s presenting sponsor for the previous four years, and that the partnership had been renewed through 2027. Each year the brand releases a commemorative Derby bottle, English Wikipedia notes, and recent bottles have carried commissioned paintings: for the 151st Derby in 2025, a work titled “Carrera Dinamica” by the Cuban-born Louisville artist Humberto Lahera, local Louisville media reported in March 2025; for the 152nd in 2026, “Dress to Impress, 152” by the Chicago artist Anna Murphy, the whiskey writer Fred Minnick reported.

A seasonal bottle follows in the autumn. Brown-Forman’s release for the 2023 holiday bottle, published in October 2023, described white raised texture evoking snow and smooth glossy gold foil. For the lettering on the core label, see our separate guide to the Woodford Reserve font.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all North American whiskey names: Bulleit, Woodford Reserve, Buffalo Trace, Four Roses, Knob Creek, Evan Williams and Crown Royal. Whiskey brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder or a distillery to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar shelf.

A whiskey brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its whiskey is actually distilled, aged and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its whiskey is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Master distillers, a growing range and a landmark site.

The whiskey has had two master distillers in the past two decades. Chris Morris held the title from 2003, and in 2023 Elizabeth McCall, who had joined Brown-Forman in 2009 and served as assistant master distiller, was named master distiller, with Morris becoming master distiller emeritus, The Whiskey Wash reported in February 2023.

The distillery’s output now runs well beyond the original bourbon. English Wikipedia lists Double Oaked, a straight rye, a straight malt and a wheat whiskey, along with limited releases including the Master’s Collection and a Kentucky-only Distillery Series. In February 2025 the brand released Chocolate Whisper Redux, which BourbonBlog described as its highest-proof bourbon to date. English Wikipedia, citing The Lane Report, says domestic sales passed one million cases in 2021.

The Derby link has also reached into the whiskey itself: Churchill Downs said in January 2023 that Woodford Reserve would place oak in the Derby Winner’s Circle to air-season for a rare bourbon marking the 150th running in 2024. The race’s official mint julep, the same release noted, is made with Old Forester, Woodford’s Brown-Forman stablemate.

For a design guide, Woodford Reserve shows how a brand launched in 1996 can borrow authority from a restored nineteenth-century landmark, then keep renewing itself through numbered labels, copper foil and an artist’s painting on a Derby bottle every spring. Compare Maker’s Mark, the Loretto bourbon sealed in red wax, and Wild Turkey, the Lawrenceburg bourbon. For this guide we use copper foil, oak brown and stone with a classical serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Woodford Reserve’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.