Recent progress on New Riff Distilling’s whiskey campus is starting to change the cityscape of West Newport.
Last week contractors began installing the precast wall panels for the new rickhouse that will become home to thousands of barrels of New Riff whiskey. The panels on the 300-foot-long by 65-foot-high rickhouse will soon be visible from the 11th Street Bridge that runs between West Newport and Covington.
The construction of the new rickhouse, along with the renovation of the nearby existing historical properties, will create more than 18,000 barrels of storage capacity on-site in West Newport. Once renovated, the warehouse will feature:
• A 100-person event space with 30-foot vaulted ceilings and views of the barrels and the bustling warehouse activity
• A Napa-style tasting room featuring whiskey samples, flights and cocktails
• An additional tasting room for intimate gatherings that will include an advanced ventilation system to allow guests to enjoy cigars with their whiskey
• A classroom for bourbon and spirits education that will be available for community use
• All barrel dumping and bottling activity
• Shipping and receiving
• Offices
When the campus opens to the public in 2018, New Riff will offer tours of the renovated warehouse as well as the rickhouse. Guests will get to see where the barrels are stored and watch barrel dumping, blending and bottling before moving to the bourbon-focused tasting room with views onto the warehouse floor.
“The first thing guests ask on distillery tours is where we store our barrels,” said Hannah Lowen, New Riff’s VP of Operations and General Manager. “It’s going to be a wonderful compliment to our preexisting tours to send fans down Route 9 to see the fruits of all the labor at the distillery.
“The smell, the scale, and the history of the warehouses will create a completely unique but balanced tourism experience. We’ll have two really different but complementary experiences – one of steel, glass and copper and one of brick and barrels.”
New Riff’s future whiskey campus is located along Route 9 in Newport, just east of the Licking River where Newport and Covington converge, which will become a major artery running four lanes from I-275 across the Taylor Southgate Bridge into Cincinnati.
“The investment the state is making into Route 9 isn’t just going to improve transportation in the area, it’s also going to bring new economic activity and jobs to West Newport and East Covington,” said New Riff Distilling President and Owner Ken Lewis. “We’re excited to be a part of that, and it’s why we’re so willing to make this $11 million investment in our whiskey campus.”
New Riff has been distilling and aging bourbon since the summer of 2014. Its first release of New Riff Bourbon and New Riff Rye are expected to hit the market during the second half of 2018, after aging four years.