The 2013 Archive — Volume XI
The Year Louisville
Became Itself.
Where bourbon, bats & breakthroughs converge — the definitive archive of Louisville’s watershed year. 1,400+ primary documents. 380 oral histories. One recoverable year, preserved in full.
Flagship Reporting · Bourbon Boom Files
Inside the Bourbon Boom Files
Four cross-indexed folders from the archive’s working collection — distillery records, label registrations, export manifests, and the Yum! Center economic study. Each row is a real accession; click through for the scan.
-
Open file →
The Stitzel-Weller Production Spike: 312,400 Barrels
Cross-referenced barrel-yield ledger against the Kentucky Distillers’ Association quarterly report. Notes in red pencil on page 14 attribute the spike to a single March contract with an undisclosed European buyer — later confirmed as a Hamburg-based distributor.
-
Open file →
Label Registrations & the Small-Batch Renaissance
Forty-one new label registrations filed with the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau between January and June 2013, mapped against still-house capacity. Includes the original Eagle Rare hand-drawn proof sheet.
-
Open file →
Manifest: 9,847 Cases Shipped to Yokohama, August 2013
Handwritten export manifest from the Port of Louisville, photographed in situ at the KYDSP offices. Includes the customs broker’s annotations and the original shipping-line container numbers.
-
Open file →
The Yum! Center $1.3B Ripple — Methodology Appendix
The original appendix from our 2013 reporting on the KFC Yum! Center’s economic ripple, adopted by four U.S. urban-planning graduate programs. Includes interview transcripts with 22 downtown stakeholders.
The 2013 Remembered Project
Voices & Plates
A partnership with the Louisville Free Public Library: 380 recorded interviews with bartenders, brewers, teachers, and church leaders — alongside twelve sepia plates from our bourbon-distillery photography collection, now in permanent rotation at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
By the numbers, 2013 is preserved.
Validation
Cited by, awarded by, advised by.
- Press Citations The Courier-Journal, WDRB, and Kentucky Monthly — 217 regional press references in 2024.
- Awards 2022 Kentucky Press Association, Best Online Special-Section Coverage. Authors hold three James Beard Media Awards and two Kentucky Historical Society Publication Prizes.
- Institutional Selected for the University of Louisville’s Ekstrom Library Special Collections, 2021. Featured by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art for our bourbon-distillery photography.
- Advisory Board Six members including the former Kentucky Bourbon Trail director, a Pulitzer-finalist sports columnist, and a former Kentucky Derby Museum curator.
“A year is not a unit of time in an archive. It is a unit of consequence. We chose 2013 because the people of Louisville made choices that year — in warehouses, in churches, in ballparks — that the city is still living inside of. Our job is to make sure those choices remain legible.”