I attend the CMDK coming-out party

February 17, 12:04 AMChicago Drinks ExaminerCharles Cowdery

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On Saturday, I had my first look at Kentucky's newest whiskey distillery, Charles Medley Distillers Kentucky, conveniently abbreviated for us as CMDK. Although the event was mostly for locals, a kind of coming-out party for a new local business, they invited me because, well, I don't know. Perhaps they  wanted to save me the trouble of crashing it.

"Local" is Owensboro, Kentucky, an Ohio River town in Daviess County (pronounced "Davis") in Western Kentucky, about 40 miles upriver from Evansville, Indiana, and about 120 miles downriver from Louisville.

CMDK is a new name, but it refers to the family that owned the place from 1940 to 1559, and operated it until it fell silent in 1991. Charles was the last Medley there, as an employee. He bought the plant when it closed, hoping to reopen it, but never could. In 2007, he sold it to Angostura, the company you may know for their Angostura bitters. They are, in fact, a big distiller of rum, vodka and other spirits, based in Trinidad and Tobago. In recent years they have been buying distilleries all over the world.

Daviess County produced its last bourbon in 1991, when this plant closed, but it once was one of the big distilling centers in Kentucky, on both sides of Prohibition. The first distillery on this site, near the river just west of downtown, was built in 1885. There were other distilleries on two of the adjacent lots.

As with the Ripy family in Anderson County and the Beam family in Nelson, most distillery operations in Daviess had a Medley in them somewhere. Most old timers in Owensboro continue to call this place Medley Brothers, the name it bore from 1940 to 1988. It was run by the five Medley brothers. Charles is the son of Wathen Medley, whose first name is actually the surname of another prominent Kentucky whiskey family from Louisville, that merged with the Medleys through marriage.

Charles, the plant's last Master Distiller, was at Saturday's event and is consulting with the new operation.

The party was held in the old bottling house, which is slated to be the new visitors center. It is a nice space that  held the 250 guests comfortably. They had a display of some CMDK hats and t-shirts, to represent where the gift shop will be. When I drove in there was a nice, new sign, a new fence, and three lighted flag poles.

Derek Schneider is the Plant Manager. He is overseeing the refurbishment now and will run the place when it opens. They are about three months into it and it has been slow going. They hope to be fixing up the still house in earnest by fall. Roof repair has taken a lot of their attention, as almost every building sustained roof damage last year in Hurricane Ike. Most of the buildings, including the warehouses, are red brick, but they have two steel clad warehouses, which are being at least partially reclad. The warehouses need a lot of repair work inside too. Warehouses are important because they are where the barrels of whiskey age.

The first CMDK new make whiskey may be entered into barrels in 2009, but I wouldn't bet on it. Whenever it happens, it will be several years after that before it is fully aged and ready for sale, so don't expect to see any whiskey from this distillery on the market before 2014.

I knew only a very few people there, but when I sat down for dinner, providence put me next to Dan Medley, whose father, John, was another one of the five brothers who ran the company back in the day. He was wearing an official Medley Kentucky Colonel tie, one of the distillery's trademarks in its heyday. (The five Medley brothers would wear nothing else.) He told me his family had researched the history of the distilling industry in Daviess County and determined that it had once contained 150 licensed whiskey distilleries.

Maybe, before too long, it will have one again. Keep your fingers crossed.