Walter Zausch was a frequent visitor to a small distillery in Franklin County, then known as Three Boys Farm Distillery. Zausch had built a wholesale business buying barrels of whiskey and helping to start boutique brands.
Walter Zausch
He stored his barrels in an aging warehouse on the farm — a repurposed barn, really — and packaged his products on its small bottling line. The Henderson native enjoyed the bucolic atmosphere, especially sipping whiskey with then-owner Ross Caldwell, who had named the enterprise after his triplet sons.
One afternoon late in the pandemic, when the farm was operating at limited visitor capacity, Caldwell turned to his friend and made an unexpected suggestion.
“He said, ‘You know, I think you like this place better than I do most days, and I think you should buy it,’” Zausch recalls. “I was like, ‘what?’”
Caldwell explained that he was considering retirement and wanted to return to his native New Orleans. His sons also had other career plans.
“So, then we drank some more bourbon, and the deal got better and better for both of us,” Zausch said. “We got down to brass tacks pretty quickly, and then all that was left to do was to break it to my wife — fortunately she was very receptive.”
Zausch took ownership of the 127-acre operation in 2021 and renamed it Whiskey Thief Distilling Co. (its LLC had already been registered as Whiskey Thief Distiller Company).
A people person with a background in technology and retail, Zausch is a University of Kentucky architecture graduate. Although he never practiced architecture, Zausch and his wife, Dana, a Lexington native, previously lived in Cupertino, California, where he worked for Apple helping to develop and refine the concept for its retail stores, expanding from fewer than a dozen to locations worldwide. Later, he did the same for Microsoft, growing its retail footprint to about 100 stores before they closed during the pandemic.
“I reached a point where I was going to need to relocate to Seattle, but Kentucky has this gravity and we wanted to stay here,” Zausch said.
After moving back to Kentucky (the couple currently live in Prospect with their two sons), Zausch worked with several Lexington-based tech start-ups, including MakeTime, where he met COO Jeff Markowitz, a Wall Street veteran who had also previously been COO of Space Tango.
“And then I bought a distillery — I blame the bourbon,” Zausch says with a laugh. “I saw the potential for making this a destination experience. It was already very authentic. Ross [Caldwell] had been growing corn that he was using in his bourbons and whiskeys, and we've kept that going. This is a working farm distillery.”
The barn at Whiskey Thief Distilling Co.’s Franklin County farm serves as both still house and hospitality space, where visitors can tour the distillery, sample whiskies, and enjoy live music on this working farm.
Markowitz came out of retirement in 2023 to join his friend at Whiskey Thief as COO.
Lisa Roper Wicker
Veteran distiller Lisa Roper Wicker joined the team earlier this year. Wicker brought experience from Limestone Branch, Starlight Distillery in Indiana, Preservation Distillery, Widow Jane, and Lexington Brewing & Distilling Co., among others. She has helped elevate brands with her expertise in whiskey-making, particularly in pot-still distillation.
Today, Whiskey Thief uses traditional pot stills to make its bourbon and rye. It also makes gin using locally grown botanicals, and brandy from farm-grown peaches.
While Whiskey Thief doesn’t distribute to liquor stores, bars, or restaurants, visitors can tour its operations and purchase bottles from its gift shop, as well as sample pours from a rotating lineup of single-barrel whiskies. If they find one they like, they can fill a bottle using a whiskey thief, label it, and take home a one-of-a-kind souvenir.
Guests can also visit the farm without reservations and enjoy the property and its laid-back atmosphere — perhaps meeting its two resident goats. Most weekends during the season there are live music, food trucks, cocktail service, and fire pits. The tasting area and patio are in the building that houses Whiskey Thief’s distilling equipment.
“People are here when we're hosing out the still, or we're cleaning fermenters, or we're milling grain or mashing in — whatever might be happening at the time they're here, that's what you're going to see,” Wicker said. “It keeps the energy up.”
The distillery also offers custom distillation and barrel storage for other brands, often start-ups without a distillery or home base. Current and past clients include Down Home, a Louisville-based brand building a distillery in Mount Washington, and Old Commonwealth Distillery, which recently purchased the historic Old Commonwealth facility in Lawrenceburg where Pappy Van Winkle was once bottled before moving to Buffalo Trace.
Live music, craft cocktails, and whiskey tastings set the tone at Whiskey Thief’s NuLu location in Louisville.
In 2024, Whiskey Thief expanded to Louisville, opening a cocktail lounge, live music venue, and tasting room in the city’s NuLu neighborhood. Like its farm operation, guests can sample whiskies straight from the barrel, bottle their own, and enjoy a full cocktail menu.
Today, Whiskey Thief employs more than 60 people across both locations.
“We have sort of an oddball business model with not distributing and just the way we deliver our product,” Zausch said. “But all of those things make us unique.”