Rye-owa: Templeton Rye Breaks Ground on New Distillery

By Sam Slaughter April 30, 2017

templeton rye — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Templeton Rye has come a long way from its illicit, bootlegging past. At the beginning of April, they broke ground on a brand new distillery, eleven years after the product was first introduced (legally) to the market.

Located in its namesake Templeton, Iowa (about ninety miles from Des Moines), the Templeton Rye distillery will be located on the company’s 20-acre parcel and will consist of a 34,500 square-foot distillery that will be able to produce 500,000 proof gallons of whiskey annually as well as an aging warehouse that will be about to hold 40,000 barrels at a time.

The goal, according to co-founder Keith Kerkhoff, is to have the new distillery open within eighteen months. Once open, tours of the production facilities will be available, allowing visitors to get a peek at how they make their rye.

Templeton currently has three expressions—their flagship rye whiskey and two age statement whiskies (a six year and a ten year) that are intended to be the first releases in a special reserve line of whiskies. If you’ve tried any of them, it was whiskey sourced from a Lawrenceburg, Indiana (something that Templeton has, thankfully, not shied away from disclosing) that was then finished and bottled at the Iowa facility. While it’ll be a few years before Templeton Rye is fully made in Templeton, the new distillery is certainly a big move in the right direction.

And Templeton isn’t the only whiskey distillery to open a new plant. Bulleit opened their new facility earlier this year as well.

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Sam Slaughter was the Food and Drink Editor for The Manual. Born and raised in New Jersey, he’s called the South home for…

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