BARDSTOWN — After Silk Velvet, the Henderson whiskey brand reborn by the Hargis family after more than a century of dormancy, made a big splash at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival in 2025, at least one member of the extended family figured a return trip would be anticlimactic.
“I didn’t think we could beat the experience of last year,” she confided.
Boy, was she wrong.
“Yesterday was crazy!” she said last Saturday morning at the 2026 KBF.
The Silk Velvet booth had been slammed Friday, the first full day of the 35th annual festival, which is one of the meccas of the bourbon world.
V.I.P. ticket holders, who got early admittance to the grounds, descended on the booth to buy bottles of two special releases: bottles from a rare barrel that shot up to 141 proof — a high-octane product that the bourbon world calls “hazmat” — and 134-proof bottles from a barrel hand-picked specifically for the Kentucky Bourbon Festival.
Clearly, the word got out.
“We sold out of the hazmat in 45 minutes,” Silk Velvet Vice President Zeb Hargis said. “The KBF bottles sold out by 1:30” on Friday afternoon.
And still, festival-goers lined up to sample, then buy other Silk Velvet bottles. Early Friday afternoon, Zeb Hargis said, the line to the booth reached back more than 100 feet. Their on-site stock of their newly released rye and single-barrel bourbon sold out between 3:30 and 4 p.m., leaving only some bottles of their small-batch bourbon. They had sold nearly 400 bottles, which they had expected to last the whole weekend.
So, “Zach (Hargis) and I left the girls” — their wives and other friends at the booth — “and booked to WKD,” Western Kentucky Distilling in Beaver Dam, 90 minutes away, to gather up dozens more cases for Saturday and Sunday.
The irony is that when they were setting up their booth on Thursday, “Kentucky Bourbon Festival folks were making fun of us because we brought so much product,” Zeb Hargis said. “We thought we had brought three times what we needed for the festival.” It was mostly gone before the end of the first full day.
“I would never have thought we would sell out” so soon, he said.
“Yesterday was insane,” agreed his brother, Zach, who is president of Silk Velvet.
What could account for the popularity of a brand that hadn’t been heard of since before World War I?
“I think it’s their master distiller,” quipped Jacob Call, who is the master distiller behind Silk Velvet.
Call was joking, but he isn’t wrong.
He was the master distiller at Green River Distilling in Owensboro, where Zach Hargis also worked, producing bourbon and rye whiskey sold not only under the Green River brand, but by a host of other brands. (At least one other brand set up at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival sold whiskey produced by Jacob Call.)
When Green River was sold to a large corporation in 2022, Call departed to help start Western Kentucky Distilling, and Zach Hargis joined him.
By 2024, the Hargis brothers were ready to relaunch Silk Velvet, having gained ownership of the trademark of the old brand that was produced at what was Winstead Distilling Co. between First and Center streets beside the railroad tracks.
The Hargises knew they wanted to use whiskey produced by Jacob Call, an eighth-generation distiller. So they began hunting down barrels of whiskey that had been produced by Call while he was at Green and sold to brokers. What they found, they sampled; what they liked, they bought. Their favorites went Silk Velvet single-barrel bottles; others were blended with other barrels to form small-batch bottles.
And a scant few barrels, including some that had been aging in the dry heat of Texas, were found to have developed into hazmat whiskey, topping an extraordinary 140 proof — an alcohol content far exceeding ordinary bottles but that are catnip to many whiskey enthusiasts and collectors.
Even on Saturday, with the hazmat bourbon gone, enthusiasts lined up at the Silk Velvet booth.
“I bought a bottle on Thursday (night), and thought I’d see what they have today,” Jason Lash of Tallahassee, Florida, said. “They were the hit of the festival last year.”
Kathy Pawlowski of Chicago had her own reasons for waiting in line to taste and perhaps buy Silk Velvet.
“Last year (at the festival) was the first time I tried it,” she said, and she bought a bottle. A friend in Chicago asked her to give her a bottle of bourbon they couldn’t buy in Chicago. So Pawlowski gave her the bottle of Silk Velvet.
“It made me sad,” Pawlowski said. “I should have kept it … It was one of my favorites of the boutique bourbons.”
She has one other regret: “I wish they sold it in Chicago.”
Kentucky Peerless has a sellout
The longest lines at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival were for one-of-a-kind releases. One such line, perhaps 150 people deep, was at the booth for Kentucky Peerless, a bourbon produced in Henderson in the latter years of the 1800s and the early years of the 1900s.
It was revived in the 2010s by Corky Taylor, who grew up in Henderson and is the great-grandson of Peerless owner Henry Kraver, and Taylor’s son, Carson. Their distillery in Louisville pays homage to Peerless’ roots in Henderson.
Peerless, which won accolades from the whiskey world starting with the release of it first aged whiskey in 2017, on Saturday released what it called Wild Berry Brownie Butter, a double-oak single-barrel bourbon. It was priced at $149.95.
It sold out that day.
Henderson dishes on display
Late Saturday afternoon at the festival, Henderson was again in the spotlight when chef Michael Ervin of Cap & Cork restaurant served some local dining specialties paired with Western Kentucky whiskeys at a premium event called “Go West for the Best of Kentucky Food and Bourbon.”
Some three dozen festival-goers paid $100 each to dine on Colonel Jim’s spicy fried catfish; a dip made from Thomason’s Barbecue baked beans and smoked chicken; a slider featuring Thomason’s “chip” (mutton and pork burnt ends) served with peach jam aioli made from Cardinal Farms’ peaches; and a transparent pie (similar to a chess pie).
Each was served with a whiskey from this region, including rye and bourbon from Silk Velvet.
Thomason’s owner Kevin Gibson and Silk Velvet’s Zach and Zeb Hargis along with distiller Jacob Call were also on hand to talk about their products.
“I think the event went incredibly well to have been food cooked in a tent on unfamiliar equipment,” Ervin said in a text message later. “The (KBF) staff were extremely helpful in helping us navigate some of the challenges. It was such a pleasure to present our food to people from all over the country.”
Update: This article was updated with a quote from Michael Ervin.
