A Welsh settler, a riverbank and a label claim.

Evan Williams is a bourbon with two birthdays. The brand itself was introduced in 1957 by Heaven Hill, the family-owned distiller in Bardstown, Kentucky, according to the company’s own history and English Wikipedia. Its name and its best-known slogan reach back much further, to the 18th-century settler Evan Williams, and the Black Label bottle carries the lines “Since 1783” and “Kentucky’s 1st distiller.” English Wikipedia notes that those words should not be read as a claim that the brand has existed continuously since then.

The man behind the name is documented in outline. A BBC Wales article of November 2013 says Williams was born in Dale, Pembrokeshire, and emigrated to America towards the end of the 18th century. The Kentucky Historical Society’s ExploreKYHistory site says he came to Kentucky around 1780 and, in 1783, built a distillery on the banks of the Ohio River at Louisville, on the east side of what is now Fifth Street; he later served as the town’s elected harbor master. Historical Marker 2445 commemorates him in downtown Louisville.

The “first distiller” line is the brand’s claim, and historians have questioned it. In his 2013 book Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage, published by the University Press of Kentucky, the historian Michael Veach, then of the Filson Historical Society, wrote that the claim does not appear in print until an 1892 publication by Reuben Durrett, that a record of Williams sailing from London to Philadelphia in May 1794 makes the 1783 date hard to sustain, and that Jacob Myers or the brothers Joseph and Samuel Davis are likelier candidates. Veach added that Kentucky’s first distiller may never be known.

Black Label, White Label and a family company.

Heaven Hill, which owns the brand, began in Bardstown in 1935, shortly after the repeal of Prohibition, as Old Heavenhill Springs. The company says its founders were local investors and the five Shapira brothers, who later bought out the other partners; English Wikipedia adds that the first master distiller was Joseph L. Beam, a cousin of Jim Beam, and that every master distiller since has come from the Beam family. Descendants of the Shapiras still own and run the business, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported in February 2015, when it also said the Evan Williams name had been registered as a trademark in the 1960s.

On the shelf the brand is organised by colour. English Wikipedia describes the mass-market Black Label, bottled at 86 proof; a White Label that is bottled in bond at 100 proof; a lighter, 80-proof Green Label sold in some regions; the 1783 small-batch bottling; and a vintage-dated Single Barrel, sealed with black wax. Flavoured liqueurs followed under the same name, among them Honey Reserve in 2009, Cherry Reserve in 2010 and Cinnamon Reserve in 2015. For the lettering on these labels, see our guide to the Evan Williams font.

Evan Williams is sold in volume. Heaven Hill said in a June 2010 release, citing Nielsen data, that it was the second-largest-selling Kentucky straight bourbon after Jim Beam. The Spirits Business reported in July 2015 that Evan Williams had entered its list of the ten best-selling world whisky brands, in tenth place on 2014 sales. Critics have rewarded its value as well as its volume: at the 17th annual Malt Advocate Whiskey Awards in February 2011, the Black Label tied with Very Old Barton as Best Buy Whisk(e)y of the Year.

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.

A fire, a new distillery and a return to Main Street.

The brand’s whiskey has moved house. On 7 November 1996 fire destroyed most of Heaven Hill’s Bardstown production plant, English Wikipedia says, after it started in an aging warehouse. Neighbouring distillers, including Brown-Forman and Jim Beam, helped make whiskey for the company until it bought the Bernheim distillery in Louisville from Diageo in 1999. Since then Evan Williams has been distilled in Louisville and aged and bottled in Bardstown. In February 2022 Heaven Hill widened its portfolio again by buying Samson & Surrey, owner of Widow Jane and FEW.

In 2013 the brand came back to where its namesake had worked. The Evan Williams Bourbon Experience on Louisville’s Main Street, part of the old Whiskey Row, opened to the public on 15 November 2013, WAVE 3 News reported, with a small working distillery of two pot stills; the station called it the first downtown Louisville distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Heaven Hill says it was the first distillery to reopen downtown since Prohibition. Louisville Business First reported in May 2021 that the first bourbon from the downtown still had been released.

The name needs a little care online. Evan Williams is also the name of a co-founder of Twitter, with no link to the bourbon; the brand’s own site is evanwilliams.com.

For a design guide, Evan Williams shows how a founding date, a contested claim to be first and a set of colour-coded labels can carry a high-volume bourbon for nearly seventy years. Compare Wild Turkey, the Lawrenceburg bourbon, and Buffalo Trace, the Frankfort distillery brand. For this guide we use label black, heritage cream and old gold with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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