How We Sourced Whiskey From Every State for the United States of Bourbon

It has been about two months since Lost Lantern released its largest project ever, the United States of Bourbon: the first blend of bourbon from all 50 states. We have been absolutely thrilled with the reception we’ve seen, starting with its announcement in the New York Times, and the great reviews we’ve received since. Two of the most common responses we’ve gotten, whether they’re from people new to Lost Lantern or people who already know us, have been: “How did you actually get bourbon from all 50 states?” and “How did you blend 50 bourbons together into something that feels like a cohesive, complete whiskey?”

The second question lies fully in Nora’s domain, as our head blender. But today I want to answer the first question, and tell the story of how we sourced everything for the United States of Bourbon. It was a project literally years in the making. We have told parts of this story before on podcasts, in interviews, and on our Instagram… but let this be the comprehensive account!

The United States of Bourbon: The Vision

We always knew that we wanted Lost Lantern to be both an independent bottler and a blending house. That is, we always planned to release both whiskies from individual distilleries and whiskies blended from multiple distilleries. That was the case from our very first release. But we didn’t initially have our eye on something as wide-ranging as the United States of Bourbon. 

Still, the idea came to us fairly early. We first thought of it while we were on our Great American Whiskey Road Trip: our epic journey of eight months that took us to 100+ distilleries all across the country, pitching the initial vision for Lost Lantern. And as we explored and found even more distilleries that we didn’t already know from our days in New York, we began to ponder the idea of a blend of whiskey from every state. 

But it was just an idea. It wasn’t a plan. It was more like “wouldn’t it be cool if someone–maybe even us–could eventually make a blend from every state and have it actually be good?” And that’s where the idea stayed for a long time. But it remained in the back of our minds, and kept growing in possibility.

The First Barrels

We actually bought the first barrels that eventually went into the United States of Bourbon quite early, and that’s because–from early on–we knew that some states would be harder than others to source. In late 2019, before we had even released any whiskey, we learned that Stonecutter Spirits in Vermont was closing its production facility and selling off its bourbon. At the time, it was the only bourbon aged in 53 gallon barrels from the state of Vermont. We couldn’t afford to snag all of it, but we did pick up a few barrels of their 4 year old bourbon for a rainy day. By then,  our thinking had evolved to, “if we ever want to do a 50-state blend, we should snap up good whiskey from difficult states when we can.” 

And that’s where it sat until 2023. In those first few years, we kept buying and releasing bourbon through our collections, notably the Summer of Bourbon, but we didn’t stash anything aside. Until we learned about the closure of Rich Grain Distilling in Mississippi, and when we got the opportunity to buy all their remaining Mississippi bourbon. Vermont was a kind of challenging state to find bourbon from (especially back in 2019). But it was our home state–we could have figured it out. But Mississippi, the state which at the time had the fewest distilleries in the country, was a different story. 

My pitch to Nora was explicitly: If we want to do a 50-state blend someday, we need these. And also they’re really good, and I bet some people would be excited about these on their own too, even though nobody knows the distillery. This, of course, ended up being an understatement: Mississippi Memory and our other Rich Grain Distilling releases have become easily our most sought-after releases. But it’s hard to overstate how much of a gamble it felt like at the time: it was by far the largest lot of whiskey we had ever bought at that time, from a closed distillery that nobody knew. It was a major moment for Lost Lantern and our vision for sourcing. 

By this time, we were talking about the idea for a 50-state bourbon blend a little more. We had released the first batch of Far-Flung Bourbon, our first bourbon blend, and we had come across more and more good bourbon from across the country. But there’s a big difference between “good bourbon comes from a lot of states” and “good bourbon comes from every state.”

Then, in mid-2024, we decided it was time to actually give it a go.

The United States of Bourbon: The True Sourcing Quest Begins

In mid-2024, we made the decision that we were officially putting the United States of Bourbon on our project roadmap. That didn’t mean we were definitely doing it. But it meant we were going to try.

This is an important distinction. Even when we started pursuing the United States of Bourbon, we still didn’t know if it would be possible. Nobody had ever done it before. There were a solid ten states or so that only had two or three distilleries making bourbon… and we didn’t know the bourbons from those states would be good enough for blending. And even if the bourbon did meet our standards, we didn’t know if those distilleries would be willing to sell us bourbon. Or if they’d have any to spare. Or if they’d let us use their name.

We had worked with distilleries in a broad swath of the country… but it’s a very big country, and the list of states where we hadn’t worked with anyone was still longer than the list of states where we had existing distillery partners.

Here’s the state of play as of August 2024:

 That map shows where we were when I headed out on a sourcing road trip, beginning with some of the states that were likely going to be the hardest: the Northern Plains. I flew from Burlington, Vermont, to Fargo, North Dakota, and began exploring. That first USB-specific sourcing trip took me across both Dakotas (Dakotae?), Nebraska, and Wyoming, and also took me to Far North Spirits in Minnesota–a distillery we had long wanted to work with and knew well, but had simply never been able to get to before.

The results of that first trip were unequivocal. All of those states had bourbon that I was excited about–Proof Artisan Distillers in North Dakota was the only bourbon I could find in the state, but it was very good, and the distillery was both impressive and serious about its vision for a Dakota Bourbon. I felt the same about BlackFork Farms in South Dakota, although it’s a younger distillery–in fact, I believe the United States of Bourbon is the first release of their actual South Dakota-distilled bourbon. Nebraska likewise had only one clear option, but it was a very good one: Brickway Brewery & Distillery in Omaha. And then Wyoming ended up having multiple good options, and we’ve now worked with two different Wyoming distilleries, although only one (Backwards, outside of Casper) is featured in the blend. 

The trip was promising. But we still had a lot of states to visit… some of them fairly easy (Virginia, North Carolina), others very challenging (Alaska, Hawai’i). It was going to be an enormous undertaking. 

And that’s when we set ourselves a deadline: If we were going to release the United States of Bourbon, we wanted it to come out in 2026, just ahead of the 250th birthday of the United States. 

Our idea had evolved into a plan and a timeline. So I hit the road again.

A Marathon and Then A Sprint

I had a little over a year. If we were going to get this project off the ground, we needed basically all of the whiskey in-house by the end of 2025 to give us enough time to blend it and actually get it ready in time. 

And that means in late 2024 and for most of 2025, I spent more time on the road than I ever had before since our Great Whiskey Road Trip. A week in Montana and Idaho. A very long one day road trip from Tucson to Phoenix to Flagstaff and back. A hop, skip, and a jump from a whiskey festival in California, to Albuquerque, to Utah, back to Idaho again. Two-day trips to Maine and Nantucket. A week-long road trip across Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alabama. And, of course, Hawai’i: a state with only one serious bourbon distillery. 

Nora came with me on that trip, and we made a vacation out of it, but the truth is it was a quite high-stakes trip. The whole dream for United States of Bourbon depended on Ko’olau Distillery: whether we liked their Old Pali Road bottled-in-bond bourbon, and whether they liked us enough to sell us some of it (despite being fairly small). Clearly, it all worked out… but we genuinely didn’t know if it would until we had made the trip halfway across the world.

The last sourcing trip, fittingly, was Alaska. As soon as I stepped off the plane, I joined the fifty-states club. But that was actually a lower stakes trip: we had multiple options and had already lined up Denali Spirits as our likely partner, pending the visit. It felt like a fitting valediction.

It was truly a marathon year. We were able to get almost all the whiskies in-house by the end of 2025, with a few stragglers coming this January.

I sat back and said, we did it! And Nora gently reminded me that the work was only half done: I had sourced all the bourbon. But she still had to blend it. Whiskey from 50 different states, 50 distilleries, more than 50 flavor profiles, into one cohesive whole. How she pulled that off is another story for another day. 

But for my part, the journey of sourcing the United States of Bourbon was a true adventure of a lifetime.