In 2010, Ken Lewis owned the Party Source, one of the largest liquor stores in the United States. It was located in Northern Kentucky, not even a mile from Cincinnati. He’d been in the business more than four decades at that point, and as the spirits buyer for the store, he started to notice a marked uptick in bourbon sales. As an entrepreneurial person, he came up with the then-crazy idea to start the New Riff Distillery, and take his decades of experience in the spirits business in the direction of production.
“It was clear that with the boom going on in Lexington and Louisville, here’s Greater Cincinnati, two and a half times the metro area of Louisville, and not one single distillery,” Lewis recalls. “There’s opportunity there. I didn’t realize at the time how involved it was going to be and how
