Bourbon has always had a communal vibe around it. Many enthusiasts make a point of never drinking it alone — and only drinking the good stuff with those whose company they enjoy.
It turns out that when creating the first scheduling platform of its kind for the bourbon tourism industry, it helped Eddie Fieldhouse to apply those same rules as well regarding the founding of The Kentucky Hug, which is scheduled to launch today (Aug. 1).
“I did not want somebody to say, ‘It’s [x-amount] for this product. Here you go. Thank you. We’ll see you in 10 years.’ I needed somebody who was going to be an official co-founder and a partner that would develop this with me,” Fieldhouse recently told me.
In 2019, Fieldhouse began building out an internal ticket-management inventory system for Pegasus Global, a recently rebranded business that was catering its long line of services — transportation, destination management, scheduling — to what is commonly known as “bourbonism” tourists who annually make their way by the millions to visit official distilleries along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and several located off the trail as well.
He initially partnered with Unbound, a Louisville-based software development company, to build the inventory system. With Unbound’s help, he created a list of larger developers that had the resources needed to construct and enable The Kentucky Hug platform to scale.
He interviewed 17 shops, before finding a connection with the folks at Slingshot, a Louisville-based software development company that has its own venture studio firm, Slingshot Ventures, to provide early-stage Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups the resources they need to get off the ground.
C2Keep, one of KY Inno's 2023 Startups to Watch, is also a Slingshot Ventures portfolio company.
“I get his mindset,” Fieldhouse said of David Galownia, president and CEO of Slingshot. “He is a very technical person, and I’m more of an emotional, big-picture person. So, we really work well together.”
Galownia and Dan Murphy, Slingshot’s director of new ventures, are two other members of The Kentucky Hug’s leadership team, as is Sarah Bhatia, the principal product owner at Slingshot.
When The Kentucky Hug launches, visitors will be able to schedule tours for eight Kentucky distilleries and four other bourbon-related experiences in one spot — as it slowly ramps up its offerings heading into September, which is Bourbon Heritage Month. It hopes to have about 40 distilleries on board by then.
How The Kentucky Hug platform works
The platform works by charging users a 7% booking fee plus a 6% tax. Fieldhouse said that unlike other players in the scheduling space, his platform will have a to-be-determined capped fee, which will be important when selecting, say, a five-figure barrel pick experience.
In November, The Kentucky Hug will offer distilleries a subscription option to have access to a “data dashboard” that the platform has collected from visitors. They will also be able to hold all their ticket inventory within the platform if they wish.
Up until then though, Fieldhouse said he is open to working with all distilleries who wish to partner and test out the system, if they sign a letter of intent (LOI) to honor the tickets that are provided to The Kentucky Hug.
In 2021, Fieldhouse and company started to conduct interviews at seven distilleries, speaking with everyone from the frontline workers to the very top of the leadership chain to assemble a list of collective pain points within the industry.
About a year later, they let approximately 40 consumers test out the product.
All the while, they kept their operation largely a secret cloaked by nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and talking to distillery workers mostly when they weren't on the clock.
“And a big reason why you haven't heard about us is with Pegasus — and with Copper Still Tours before that — I have always been of the mindset that the hardest job in our state is a distillery job … and the last thing I want to do as an outside partner that’s supposed to help is come in there and tell them, ‘We need 100 meetings, and I need you to stop your day-to-day business so that I can get something done.’”
When I was working on my cover story on asset-based lending related to bourbon barrels, Kentucky Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) representative Kristin Voskhul told me there were 97 distilleries in the state (and climbing), not all of which are open to tourists (see Heaven Hill’s Bernheim Distillery, and Brown-Forman’s distillery in Shively, for instance).
A large portion of those — 47 to be exact — are on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Craft Tour, as designated by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association (KDA). Fieldhouse said the KDA has been supportive of his company — and that he was hopeful to work out a future partnership with the organization.
Furthermore, he said when The Kentucky Hug’s official app is rolled out early next year, it will go a long way in helping promote the trail’s digital passport.
In 2022, a record number of more than 2.2 million tourists visited distilleries along the trail. That does not take account a few others, though, namely Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, which had a record 470,507 guests visit its grounds last year.
Fieldhouse estimated that 70 to 80 distillers in the state were open for the public to visit.
The Kentucky Hug is in the midst of raising a $1 million pre-seed round, which will cover the platform's development, as well as marketing costs. Since February, the company has raised approximately $225,000 in capital through private accredited investors. That number does not consider the more than $24,000 it has raised on Wefunder, nearly reaching the halfway mark of its goal of $50,000.
Given that it had reached the $20,000 mark on Wefunder, it also has received a $20,000 from Render Capital — and will later receive a match for whatever that overall number will from Wefunder and Render from Keyhorse Capital.
A history in the bourbon industry
Fieldhouse’s ties to the bourbonism industry run deep. He grew up in Prospecty, Kentucky, and was a longtime childhood friend of the younger brother of Elizabeth McCall, the master distiller at Woodford Reserve, who I spoke with earlier this summer for a profile story.
In 2016, he formed Copper Still Tours a distillery-centric destination management company, which was an arm of the company his mother has run, R&R Limousine, since 2003 to differentiate the other services that R&R provided such as chauffeured corporate transportation.
In 2013, his mother asked Fieldhouse, who was living in Baltimore at the time, to return home, as the number of visitors traveling up and down the bourbon trail began to significantly increase, six years after the start of the passport program in 2007.
“For the first couple of years, I mostly was just trying to figure out what is this industry,” said Fieldhouse, who added that at the time the tour reservation system at most distilleries consisted of a writing utensil and a piece of paper.
Three months after Copper Still Tours began, the KDA was able to get Kentucky Senate Bill 11 passed, which allowed distilleries to sell on-site whether they were in a dry county.
“By the end of the year … the floodgates had opened,” Fieldhouse said.
Which all led to this launch.
“We are here to help the industry first, and the customer by proxy,” Fieldhouse said. “The customer is having a tough time, but the distilleries are having a much harder time. We’re here to solve problems here in this state. We’ve tried to make that as clear as possible with our name … We are here for the long haul. We’re not going to give up. We’re going to be here, until we get it done.”
