An incredible number of distillery tours somehow all offer a version of the same story: a family recipe, a copper still, a founder who bet it all. Horse Soldier Farms tells a very different one.
The men behind it were among the first U.S. Special Forces into Afghanistan after 9/11, riding into the mountains on horseback because of the terrain. Their story was so wild it became a movie (12 Strong, with Chris Hemsworth) and eventually a bronze statue at Ground Zero.
Twenty-five years later, they’ve stuck together — and poured roughly $121 million into 225 acres of Pulaski County, Kentucky, to build a destination distillery that will anchor the southern end of the bourbon trail.
I spent a few days there in June, before the public opening, walking the grounds. The question I kept coming back to wasn’t how they made the bourbon. It was, “Who looks at the current economy, at a town that only started selling liquor in 2013, in a county that’s still technically dry, and decides to build one of the biggest distilleries in the state?”
The answer, it turns out, is the same kind of person who rides a horse into a war.
The operator
Spend ten minutes with Scott Neil, and you understand the whole company.
Neil is a retired Green Beret Master Sergeant, one of the first operators into Afghanistan, and a co-founder of the distillery. He comes from a military family that, by his telling, has fought in every American war back to the Revolution. When the team was discussing a boat for the property, he mentioned — the way most people mention a grocery run — a time he was on a gunboat headed down the Euphrates.
If his past reads like U.S. history, his current life outside the distillery is an adventure novel. He reenacts historical battles in their original locales, like D-Day in France. He’s worked alongside divers recovering the remains of American service members lost in the Pacific, at Saipan. He had his portrait painted by a former president. (A copy is hanging in his office.)
None of this is a lark; it’s who Neil and the founders are. The distillery is a 200-plus-acre expansion of it.
The monument
If Neil is a great character, the distillery and the surrounding environment are a heck of a set piece.
Horse Soldier Farms sits on more than 225 acres in Somerset, two hours and change outside Louisville. The production facility lights up red, white, and blue after dark. The spirit safe — the locked cabinet where new make runs off the still — is modeled on the Statue of Liberty. It’s not exactly subtle, but none of it is trying to be.
Every bottle of Horse Soldier is pressed in a mold forged from steel salvaged from the World Trade Center. Neil has told the story on the record before: they were broke veterans who couldn’t afford a $60,000 bottle mold, so he called in a favor, got a ton of WTC steel through the Port Authority, and sent it to a foundry. Now every bottle that comes off the line has, in a sense, touched Ground Zero.
By the numbers, this is a serious operation. American Freedom Distillery, the production arm, is built for roughly 7 million proof gallons a year, with more than 46,000 barrels already aging on site.
The company is projecting around 30,000 visitors annually. They timed the grand opening to July 1, 2026 — the front edge of America’s 250th birthday — with a ribbon-cutting, a Professional Bull Riders event, and a concert.
The bourbon
None of this would matter if the whiskey were an afterthought. To the founders’ credit, it isn’t.
Horse Soldier turns 10 this year, which makes the Kentucky farm the back half of a longer arc: the founders started as veterans sourcing and blending someone else’s distillate, learning the business bottle by bottle, and only now own the stills to make it themselves. The core lineup runs wheat-forward: a Straight Bourbon, a Small Batch, and a Barrel Strength that does the most talking, plus limited runs like the Commander’s Select and a new Liberty Edition.
The Straight bourbon is a no-nonsense workhorse, while the Barrel Strength is a nice flex piece — though for my money, the Small Batch hits the particular sweet spot of drinkability, flavor, and higher-proof punch. Commander’s Select will be hard to get your hands on, but definitely worth a sample (or three) for those who have access or can visit the distillery.
All in all, the lineup is smart, sensible, and business-savvy. The company also operates a handful restaurants, so their flagship bourbon is an easy well option for them. Wheat-profile bourbons have proven time and again to be a good bet, and Horse Soldier has had a decade to refine their portfolio to where they want it.
This isn’t a startup swinging for the fences on day one; it’s a brand that spent ten years proving the story sells, then drummed up the facility (and the financing) to match.
The money
Here’s the part that makes the whole thing look either crazy or shrewd, depending on where you stand: bourbon is, by most measures, in a glut.
Kentucky is sitting on an all-time high of around 16 million aging barrels — an oversupply some estimates put at 300%. Jim Beam paused production at its main Kentucky distillery for all of 2026, Brown-Forman sold their cooperage, and Heaven Hill, Maker’s Mark, and Wild Turkey all trimmed output in 2025. American whiskey exports fell 19% in 2025. Distillers are stepping off the gas, while Horse Soldier hit the accelerator.
It isn’t running on grit and patriotism alone. In 2022, the Spirit of Gallo — the spirits arm of E. & J. Gallo, the largest family-owned winery in the country — took a strategic stake in the brand, its first move into American whiskey. It wasn’t the last: in early 2026, Gallo bought Four Roses for up to $775 million, making the Lawrenceburg distillery and Horse Soldier corporate siblings.
That’s the backdrop for a $121 million build in a county that’s technically still dry. The market is telling everyone else to slow down, and yet there’s a 225-acre distillery lit up in three colors, anchored by a Statue of Liberty spirit safe. It’s an unusual pairing — California money, Kentucky bourbon, and a bottle molded from Twin Towers steel — but it’s exactly why Horse Soldier Farms exists at the scale it does. The founders lived the story, and Gallo helped supply the runway.
The men who started Horse Soldier once rode toward a war because it was the only way in. Opening one of Kentucky’s biggest distilleries into the teeth of a bourbon glut, in a less-well-known county, is a smaller kind of improbable — but it’s the same instinct. In this economy, it might just be the only way in.
