The event creates a clear discontinuity in distilling location even though other company and site functions survived.
The specialist retrospective links the physical loss of the distilling plant to the later production move.
Thomas attributes the absence of distillation at Bardstown to the November 1996 fire, which spread from the warehouses to the production plant and left the distillery fatally damaged.
Article lines 46–47
Fire summary
Fire summary
Paraphrase and locator checked against the public article on 2026-08-25. Barrel-loss figures were intentionally excluded from this Excerpt.
Evidence
Thomas attributes the absence of distillation at Bardstown to the November 1996 fire, which spread from the warehouses to the production plant and left the distillery fatally damaged.
Locator
Fire summary; article lines 46–47.
Context
The specialist retrospective links the physical loss of the distilling plant to the later production-location break.
Research boundary
Use this for the existence of the production-location discontinuity, with precise loss totals verified elsewhere.