Potter Jane Distilling Company: Making Whiskey Fun Again
September 3, 2025
Potter Jane Distilling Company is bringing fun back to whiskey, pairing humor with decades of hard-earned expertise. This is the story behind the two founders that dreamed up the idea (now a reality) during what they like to call “Distillery Fantasy Camp”.
“We are talking about making whiskey. Yes, we are intense about the liquid itself but the rest? The rest should be fun. We want people to laugh. We want people to smile.” – Jane Bowie
Malteurop Celebrates Distilleries
Malteurop Malting Company (MMC) understands that malting isn’t just about the malts. It’s about crafting relationships while honoring traditions. MMC has joined forces with a few of these exceptional distilleries to highlight their stories of innovation, perseverance, and collaboration in an industry that has long recognized that spirits bring people together.
Potter Jane Distilling Company: Meet the spirited duo behind the real outcome of distillery fantasy camp
We were thrilled to sit down with Denny Potter and Jane Bowie, the spirited duo behind Potter Jane Distilling Company in Springfield, Kentucky. Known for their impressive resumes and deep-rooted love for the craft, Denny and Jane brought a refreshing mix of expertise and humor to our conversation.
Their playful banter and easy chemistry reflect not only years of friendship but also a shared commitment to creating something truly special in the world of whiskey. While their doors aren’t officially open to the public just yet, their passion for distilling, and the vision behind Potter Jane, is something well worth the wait.
In their words…
How did you get started in the industry?
Jane: I was born and raised in Kentucky, but not in the bourbon industry, I’d been backpacking around Asia and living abroad. But my mom was heckling me to get a job. Basically, she cut out a newspaper advertisement. Not long after, I was hired by Maker’s Mark at 25 years old.
We both [Jane and Denny] actually applied, same newspaper, same ads, different jobs. I applied for an event coordinator position at Maker’s Mark, even though I did not want to be an event coordinator. But to appease my mom I wrote a letter, and my opening line was, “I don’t want this job.” But I pitched them instead saying that if they ever wanted someone to travel around the world and teach people about bourbon, I was their girl.
And they called! They were starting to look at growing the export market for Maker’s Mark. This was in 2007. Three interviews later, I was hired by Rob Samuels, who was the grandson of the founders. I was the first international employee at Maker’s. I ended up being based out of the UK in London, and I launched the brand in new markets.
I came back to the States five years in, during the bourbon boom and took on a more commercial role and decided I didn’t really want to be in sales and marketing. I loved the liquid, so I nagged my way into blending and innovation and spent a decade or so managing maturation, innovation, and blending while working closely with Denny and the team.
Denny: I’ve been in the industry for twenty-seven years. I started out when I was 24 as a lab tech at Jim Beam. I was a biology major but wanted to be a marine biologist. I lived in Indiana. Difficult. I was working nights in a safety clean lab, and two years into that, I’m thinking I can’t keep doing this s**t. So, I answered an ad for a lab tech at Jim Beam. I was at Jim Beam for five years when I came across the ad for a position at Maker’s Mark.
I was at Maker’s Mark for seven years, part of which landed me in the Virgin Islands. I came back, worked at another Beam plant, left, went to Heaven Hill, ended up being VP of Ops and Master Distiller there, and then went back to Maker’s in 2018 as General Manager and Master Distiller. So, Jane and I had worked together during my first tenure at Maker’s. When I came back from the Virgin Islands, Jane was running all of the innovation and liquid development, over all of warehousing. We were working a lot of one on one together between ops and innovation.
Where did the idea for Potter Jane come from?
Denny: We got this crazy idea. Started out more as a joke, really. Or not a joke.
Jane: It was a COVID hobby. Every week, we’re like, we’re gonna get a hobby this week, and this is what we do, instead. We like to work. We love the industry. We spend our free time going to other distilleries or breweries.
Denny: We drink a lot.
Jane: During COVID, we were neighbors. So, we would spend weekends hanging out, and naturally, play distillery fantasy camp. If we were gonna build a distillery, what kind of fermentation philosophies would we have? Or if we were gonna lottery pick a warehouse crew, who would we pick? Then we would go to other people and ask them to score our draft picks. I mean, this is how sad we are.
Denny: Well, I mean, again, we drank a lot. Some of the best ideas.
Jane: It truly was something to pass the time during COVID when we’re only allowed to socialize with one another. From a hobby, it started becoming something to explore; how realistic could this be? And our one caveat was we really love our jobs. We really love the company we work for. We would only do this if we could own it ourselves. And then how could two s**t munchers own a $50,000,000 distillery? It was fantasy, pretty lofty, and we never really thought there was much of a chance of it happening.
Denny: We never thought in a million years that it would happen. We’re not naive, but naive enough. If somebody just tells us no, that’s fine. You know? We know the ops. We know the financials. We know pretty much everything there is to know about designing, building, and running a distillery. So, then it was us thinking if we’ve got all these credentials, maybe we’ll eventually talk to the right people. And when we say people, we knew it had to be a bank, because that’s the only way you can secure the funds and still be owners.
Jane: We were so stupid. Do you just walk into a bank and ask for $30,000,000? But, we did! We walked into our local bank!
Denny: I mean, the president IS a good friend.
Jane: He’s a really good friend! He didn’t laugh at us to be fair, but he was like, we’re a small local bank. We can’t give you that kind of money. But he did have great advice.
Denny: Well, after all the pertinent discussions, he did share what he could provide for the project. It was generous, but not enough for the whole project.
Jane: So, we kept having conversations and were introduced to a national bank trust; had some meetings that felt fine but not that realistic. And then in May of 2022 they said, “We’re gonna loan you the money to go build this distillery.”
And then I had bile coming up. F**k we gotta go build this thing!
Denny: It was, “Holy s**t! We gotta go do this!” And not just that, but we’ve gotta quit these amazing jobs that we have.
Jane: With the paycheck that clears every time.
Denny: Damn good benefits. You know? So, it was about a minute of paralysis. And then, yeah! We’re excited! Let’s go do it! Full steam ahead! I mean, it’s also a little bit of liquid courage too. Right? One of our partners and somebody that’s been instrumental in us being here is our friend and attorney, Jim Willett, who is Jane’s next-door neighbor. We were hanging out and we were talking about land and what it takes to get options on land and where we would go. .
And two days later, Jim calls us up. “I think I found some property in Washington County for you guys.” We’re like, “We don’t even know what you’re talking about.” So, we might have property. And then it was compounded to the point that the bank offered us the money. We had a good business plan. And the next thing we needed to do was just give our notice, leave, and get started.
And so that’s exactly what happened. It was just kinda these baby steps and then a giant leap. But it’s been good. It’s very surreal. We’re now three years into this, and we just started up about six months ago and we did our first mash. We’re starting to get into fairly routine operations now. It’s very surreal.
Where are you at in terms of production?
Jane: Our long term goal is to have about a seven-year-old product as a flagship. We probably will start releasing something at four years old that would sit on a shelf. So, we’re nowhere close to Potter Jane coming to a bar near you. We might source something in the meantime to have something to drink at our distillery.
Denny: We might collab with somebody, and it’s just anything that we think is gonna be fun and relevant.
Jane: It would need to be something we were excited about versus checking a box. Part of it’s been get through the build, hire the team, get the construction done, see where you are, and then we can go put energy into what comes next as far as marketing or product or distribution.
Are you open to the public yet?
Jane: Kind of. Between forty-five years in the industry combined there have been consumers that have followed our careers. So, we’ve actually been booking tours by appointment only. We do have plans to be on the Bourbon Trail and have a more organized tour program. But right now we’re probably giving tours three to four times a week.
Denny: It’s gonna be a long time before we can do anything drive-up. We don’t have the building for that yet. We have the distillery and two warehouses. At some point, we’ll build a visitor center.
Jane: We have a full team. There are 20 employees including the two of us. Our department heads have about a hundred years combined experience in the industry as well.
Why start over and what advice do you have for others interested in the distilling industry?
Jane: I think for us it really does go back to as basic as it sounds. We love this industry. We’re pretty good in this industry. We don’t have a lot of hobbies. Money isn’t necessarily what gets us out of bed every morning. Don’t get me wrong, I f**king love money. I love vacations, I love drinking good wine. I love those things.
But I think for us it was if this is what we’re gonna do with the rest of our lives why not try to do it for yourself and then if you can ever even make what we were making before, like everything else is the cherry on top. We have a twenty-year master plan for this campus. We have a thirty-year brand plan that I hope we get to do. We always joke that maybe our kids will f**k it all up one day.
Like, wouldn’t that be great? We’re lifers.
Denny: In our industry, it’s a long-term play. If you don’t have patience, you’re gonna get burned. With the capital that’s needed… over the next five years, our overall capital spend will be at least $125,000,000. You’ve gotta have that long term outlook, and you cannot look at this as a short-term moneymaker because you’ve gotta reinvest every dollar. We’ve learned that through the families that we’ve worked with that are generational. Whether it’s the Samuels or the Shapiras’ or the Beams’, they get it. They are generational operations.
No matter how long you’ve been around, the bulk of your money needs to go back in. Even when you get on the brand side, where you’ve got more money coming in, well, a lot of that goes back out for marketing and all the things that you need to be doing in order to get your people or to get your brand to consumers all over the world. But if you have a different outlook than that, at some point, it’s going to bite you.
Jane: It’s the dumbest business model in the world, though. Insane. It’s so much money up front. Your inventory is evaporating. You’re waiting five years to have a return on it. Like, it’s really f**king stupid when you sit down and talk about it as a business model.
Why did we do this?
Denny: We’re idiots. There’s a big picture, but it’s very, very, very fuzzy. It’s just been getting up and getting through the day. It is not easy. I don’t think we underestimated how hard it was going to be, but I don’t know that you can estimate how hard it is. Just take little bites. Then you’ll see it. Like sitting here now looking out into the lab.
Three years ago, it seemed very daunting. It was just a day at a time and all of a sudden, we’re here.
Tell us more about your philosophy of making whiskey fun again?
Jane: We’re fortunate to have a really great creative team. They resigned from their roles about the same time we left Maker’s. They called and said, “We’re tired of watered-down corporate bulls**t. We wanna create your brand. It’s really great. They’re not from our industry. They’re not bourbon nerds. They bring in a different vision and energy, and they push us to some uncomfortable spaces.
I think for us, one of the big things we talked about before we jumped off the ledge was the shelf’s pretty crowded. If we don’t have a point of view we should shut the f**k up and stay where we are.
And when we started talking about the whiskey the point of view was, as the big guys have gotten bigger and the craft guys are bringing craft techniques in, nobody’s really making the bourbons we fell in love with even twenty years ago because process changes have been so rampant as the industry’s gotten so successful overnight. So liquid wise, we just want to make bourbon that reminds us of why we fell in love with bourbon in the first place. Nothing revolutionary but things you don’t see as much of anymore: longer fermentations, lower set temps, no enzymes.
And then on the brand side, one of the things we’ve seen as well, we’re pretty informal. Bourbon didn’t used to be so serious. And we kinda miss the fun. We just wanna get back to it being fun and laughing. We’re not f**king curing cancer or sending chimps to Mars. It’s whiskey. It should be fun.
We are talking about making whiskey. Yes, we are intense about the liquid itself but the rest? The rest should be fun. We want people to laugh. We want people to smile.
I don’t know what our brand is gonna look like yet, but we’re relying on people much smarter than us in that space to help bring it to life and we’re trusting them to do that. I do think it will be fun. Drinking with your friends is fun. Coming together over a cocktail or glass of something, we love that. That’s our favorite, and we want Potter Jane to be a part of those moments for people.
Tell us more about why you chose Malteurop and their malts
Jane: We use Malteurop’s Distillers Malt right now, which has been tasting really good. As we think about the next ten years of growth, right now it’s really about getting the fundamentals right.
We always say you gotta earn your “weird” a little bit, but right now it’s really just about getting good quality grain in the door, making the best quality bourbon we can using standard processes. And because we don’t believe in enzymes at all, we’re using a decent percentage of malted barley in all of our mash bills, not just for ourselves, but for our customers as well.
Regarding Malteurop, it’s all of it: the product, people, company. But it all really starts with Rick [Barney] for us, honestly.
This is still very much a relationship industry. It’s still a very human industry. And so, for us having someone that we pick up the phone and he always answers whether it’s hey I’m so sorry but we need an extra truck delivered tomorrow, he makes it happen. And then after visiting Montana [Barley Days] last year and seeing the facility [Great Falls plant]: the cleanliness, the thoughtfulness, how they’re actually malting the barley, meeting the farmers, how it’s grown, the quality that goes into the farm.
So I think it’s all the above. They’re a reliable supplier that produces a consistent quality product from a yield but also from a taste. It’s been tasting really good and when you’re using mash bills that have 13 to 15% malt, this isn’t just conversion for us, it’s also flavor, and they provide really great quality on both of those things.
Denny: Rick has just made it so easy. We literally could text Rick right now, and we would have a load of malt in two hours. Obviously, the quality and everything else is the most important, but when you have somebody that can handle the logistics, and it’s never an issue, that goes a long way too. Rick’s been fantastic.
And his dad [Rick Barney, Sr.] was the exact same way. Probably one of the most beloved people in the industry. Probably should be in the Bourbon Hall of Fame, to be honest. He’s just a phenomenal person. They’re two peas in a pod. They’re both great people.
What is your go to spirit or other beverage?
Denny: It’s simple. Bourbon. I mean, I love an old fashioned, but I kinda get tired of them. But if you’re asking what brand, we’re free agents. We can do whatever we want. We’ll always love Maker’s. We’ll always love Elijah Craig. Love Old Forester.
Jane: I love bourbon with just a beer back.
Thank You!
Laughter ended that statement and what a way to end an entertaining and highly inspirational conversation. Jane and Denny, you are most definitely making whiskey fun again! As the saying goes, good ideas don’t happen over a salad.
We’re grateful that Denny and Jane’s distillery fantasy camp produced an actual distillery. One we can’t wait to visit. As they say…Whiskey coming one day!
Malteurop recognizes the effort that distilleries put forth every day to craft the spirits we all love. That is why MMC’s Craft Sales Managers – managers like Rick Barney – want to highlight a few of these distilleries.
In the end, it’s not just about the spirits, but about the community that gathers around them.
Connect with Potter Jane Distilling Company
Potter Jane Distilling Company
Whiskey coming one day
Springfield, Kentucky
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About Malteurop Malting Company (MMC)
Malteurop Malting Company (MMC) is based in North America—specializing in growing and producing quality malts for the beer, whiskey, and food processing industries. With local farms and Malthouses spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, Malteurop’s commitment to excellence is fully ingrained into every batch it produces, ensuring businesses of any size can create the finest beverages and food products on the planet.
Visit www.malteuropmaltingco.com to learn how we can support your malting needs.
Contact us at customersuccess@malteurop.com or (844) 546-MALT (6258) for questions or to place your order.
Malting is our passion. Quality is our promise.