There’s a moment about halfway through this conversation with Sam Lacy where he stops recapping events and starts talking numbers — 37 states, 900-plus bookings, a local bar up 57% in a single week — and you can hear it click into place: National Bourbon Week has stopped being a nice idea and become an economic engine for a small Kentucky town. Sam is the Executive Director of the Bourbon Capital Alliance, and he joined me fresh off the third annual National Bourbon Week, held June 14–21 across Bardstown and the surrounding counties. Eight full days, ten partner distilleries, and — by his own admission — barely a chance to catch his breath before we recorded. From a Lawn Ceremony to an Eight-Day Festival It’s easy to forget how young this event actually is. Three years ago, National Bourbon Week was closer to a single ceremony on a lawn. This year, it was a full week of distillery-hosted experiences: a Big Vat blending class and the debut of Big Vat Liar at Potter Jane, wood finishing at Old SteelHouse, a “proof by the spring” tasting at Log Still, the Beam Luau, Maker’s Mark’s Bill’s Bourbon Soirée, and a downtown bar crawl that sold out in a single day. Special releases — Elijah Craig 21, the 250th Anniversary Wadiboon from Preservation, Big Bat Liar, and a first-ever Knob Creek 15-Year Cask Strength — gave collectors a reason to plan around the week, not just show up for it. Sam’s read on why this year worked so well comes down to one word he kept returning to: experience, not event. “Consumers want experiences,” he told me, “and particularly if you can offer them a unique educational experience, all the better.” Distilleries leaned into that, and the bookings followed. The Mashup, Reimagined One of the clearest examples of that evolution is the Bourbon Capital Mashup, the Alliance’s signature tasting event featuring all ten partner distilleries. This year, the event expanded its footprint by partnering with Neat Bourbon Bar next door to Bespoken Bond, giving VIP ticket holders an early window with the distilleries before general admission opened, plus a dedicated lounge with vintage pours and a menu from chef Newman Miller. Ticket sales jumped from about 130 last year to 160 this year, and it sold out. Sam’s takeaway wasn’t just that it sold well — it’s that attendees who’d been to both years told him, unprompted, that year two was simply better. That’s the value of a real postmortem: distillery partners and the Alliance sit down after the week, compare notes, and build the next version from what actually happened, not just what was planned. The Numbers Behind the Week Here’s where the conversation got genuinely interesting. After National Bourbon Week wrapped, Sam spent days compiling booking data from partner distilleries — location, event attendance, timing — into a spreadsheet of more than 900 individual bookings. The findings: visitors came from 37 states, and 70% of bookings came from outside Kentucky entirely. That’s not a regional festival. That’s a national one, and it’s happening in a town that most people couldn’t find on a map five years ago. Sam is using that data for more than bragging rights — he’s building the case for a real sponsorship program heading into 2027, and he’s already pulling hotel occupancy and Airbnb data to round out a full economic-impact report. One local bar owner told him he was up 57% over a typical week. Multiply that across restaurants, hotels, and shops downtown, and you start to see why Sam calls bourbon tourism “not dead at all” — a pointed rebuttal to the periodic headlines suggesting the category has peaked. Enter the Bourbon Capital Diplomat If National Bourbon Week is the Alliance’s flagship event, the Bourbon Capital Diplomat Certification Experience might be its most ambitious long-term project. Officially launched to the media in June, the program addresses something the Alliance identified as a gap all the way back in its founding community study: Bardstown’s hospitality workers — the bartenders, servers, and front-desk staff who talk to visitors every day — often don’t know as much about the ten distilleries around them as the guests asking the questions. The curriculum, built directly with input from all ten partner distilleries, runs about two hours inside the Bourbon Capital Academy classroom at the Brindiamo Penthouse. It opens with a welcome cocktail and a quick lesson on building a proper old fashioned, moves into a guided tasting (Basil Hayden, Monk’s Road Rye, Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond, and Old SteelHouse Batch 2 were on the mat this round, rotating quarterly), and weaves in video content shot directly with master distillers like Fred Noe, John Rempe, etc. — so the story behind each pour comes from the source, not a script. Participants finish with a 50-question exam; pass at 80% and you’re a Certified Bourbon Capital Diplomat, pin included. Sam is candid that this program will take time to build momentum, and that it’s designed to stay alive rather than end at graduation — biannual “Diplomat Summits” will keep certified diplomats connected to new releases and distillery updates. The long-term vision reaches beyond Bardstown too: conversations are already underway with the Kentucky chapter of the United States Bartenders Guild to bring bartenders in from Louisville and Lexington, with an eye toward eventually reaching bars far outside the state. What’s Next With National Bourbon Week’s postmortem underway and 2027 dates already being planned, Sam’s next few months belong almost entirely to the Diplomat program — though he’s also eyeing an offsite version during September’s Kentucky Bourbon Festival. For now, his advice for anyone thinking about next June is simple: book your hotel or Airbnb early. Bardstown fills up fast. Want the full conversation? Listen to the audio episode or watch on YouTube — links below. Enjoyed this one? Subscribe to EmbellishPod on Substack for new episode write-ups, extra context you won’t hear anywhere else, and first access to future interviews with the people building Kentucky’s bourbon industry. This is a public episode. 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