Dylan’s distillery to sell local honey

Keith Green hopes pair­ing his hon­ey with Bob Dylan’s bour­bon will bring sweet success.

The local bee­keep­er and his part­ner, Richard Sturgill, are col­lab­o­rat­ing with the music icon’s Heaven’s Door Distillery to age their Double Barrel Honey in its charred oak bour­bon bar­rels, then bot­tle and sell it under the Heaven’s Door label.

The Winchester brand’s name will also be on the label in small­er print.

“They had talked with a girl who was help­ing us, and they tast­ed our hon­ey and thought they could sell it,” Green said when asked how the deal came about.

Green and Sturgill have been sell­ing Double Barrel Honey since the 2018 Daniel Boone Pioneer Festival. That was also the same year Heaven’s Door began pro­duc­ing small batch­es of bour­bon at its dis­tillery on land that was once owned by Squire Boone, Daniel’s brother.

Dylan and Spirits Investment Partnership bought the for­mer Six Mile Creek Distillery and its 160 acres in Henry County in 2015. Its pub­lic open­ing is planned for this spring.

Double Barrel Honey is made at Keith and Jane Green’s home in The Ridings.

Green has oth­er kinds of hon­ey that he sells local­ly, but Double Barrel, which is aged in bour­bon bar­rels from the Buffalo Trace and Woodford Reserve dis­til­leries, is by far their biggest seller.

Green said it was Sturgill’s idea to put the hon­ey in used bour­bon bar­rels to fla­vor it.

“We’ve been aging hon­ey in bar­rels for Buffalo Trace for three years now, and this will be the fourth year that we’ve been doing it for Woodford,” Green said.

“We’ve got it in over a hun­dred stores in Central Kentucky, but we’re expand­ing into Nashville, and we even have a dis­trib­u­tor in Alabama,” he said.

“It’s kept me busy,” he said. “When we start­ed out, I just expect­ed to sell one bar­rel a year, but in the past year, we’ve sold over 20 bar­rels of honey.”

Green said they haven’t done any adver­tis­ing oth­er than hav­ing a Facebook page and an Instagram account. It’s all been by “word of mouth.”

“I’ve just always thought that if you had a good prod­uct at a good price, it would sell, but it’s gone way beyond my expec­ta­tions,” he said.

Green said that ini­tial­ly, Heaven’s Door wants to age two bar­rels of hon­ey, one for four months and the oth­er for eight.

The oak bar­rels, which Green said will soak up to 10 pounds of hon­ey in the aging process, will be returned to Heaven’s Door and used to age hon­ey-fla­vored whiskey, which the api­arist described as a “hot item” in the spir­its market.