Four Expressions, Reborn.
Crafted in 1880, silent for a century, now poured again. Jacob Call distills. Zach Hargis blends. The Hargis family picks every barrel.
A 7-Year-Old
Kentucky Straight Bourbon.
Distilled by Jacob Call, then hand-selected by the Hargis family, barrel by barrel. Layers of caramel, toasted oak, and warm spice, finishing the way the name promises.
Uncut. Full Strength.
Straight from the Barrel.
Each release is a single barrel at full proof. No water added, no apologies made. The proof varies, the character does not. Pulled from the rickhouse the day Jacob Call says it's ready.
Kentucky Straight Rye.
Sharper. Spicier. Still Ours.
Seven years old, bottled at 107 proof. Ninety-five percent rye, five percent malted barley. Chewy and candied where the bourbon is silk and velvet. A second side of the same family.
Twelve Barrels.
One Signature.
Zach Hargis blends twelve hand-selected barrels across two mashbills to deliver the same silk-and-velvet finish, pour after pour. The character that earned the name, bottled to be consistent.
All four, together.
The whole revival in one line, on one shelf.
A Bourbon, a Pause, a Revival.
First crafted in 1880. Silenced by Prohibition. Reborn by the Henderson family that pieced the brand back together, bottle by bottle.
The Origin
In the winter of 1880, Colonel A.S. Winstead left his father-in-law's distillery, partnered with Bona Hill, and produced the first batch of bourbon on the site of Henderson's old Car Works. He tasted it, called it the smoothest whiskey on the market, and named it for the only two things he could think of finer than itself: silk and velvet.
Within a decade, the distillery had grown to 250 bushels a day. By the turn of the century, Silk Velvet had earned a national reputation, shipped to every section of the United States.
The Long Silence
By 1910, the founder's son E.W. had taken over the distillery. Two years later, Colonel Winstead passed at eighty-two. By 1917, the Webb-Kenyon Act was already choking the mail-order trade. In 1920, Prohibition closed the distillery for good. The same year, E.W. died at fifty-two.
A bourbon that once rode railcars from coast to coast went quiet. The recipe slipped into attics and auction houses. For a hundred years, Silk Velvet existed only in old newspaper clippings and the memory of the families who had once made it.
The Revival
The Hargis family of Henderson found Silk Velvet the way you find any forgotten thing: in pieces. Old bottles in attics. Faded labels. Yellowed receipts from a distillery that closed before their grandfathers were born. The pieces became a project, and the project became a partnership with Jacob Call, an 8th-generation Kentucky master distiller whose family has been distilling since 1791.
On December 9, 2024, Silk Velvet came home to the shelf where it began. The first bottles in over a century sold out the same day. Today, every bottle is still chosen the way it was on day one: by hand, by the family, barrel by barrel.
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