The day after I spoke to Brian Luftman, co-founder of Never Say Die, a British telephone box was due to be delivered to a building site on West Short Street in downtown Lexington, Kentucky.
It will stand outside the first brand home for Never Say Die, the bourbon distilled in Kentucky, shipped across the Atlantic in barrels and matured at White Peak Distillery in Derbyshire. Luftman hopes the phone box might serve as a way into what he says will be “the coolest bar in Kentucky.”
Expected to open in October or November of 2026, the brand home will also be the only place in the world where visitors can fill bottles of Double Ocean, a bourbon that has crossed the Atlantic twice in its original barrels.
I asked Brian how you build a multinational brand home that feels like two countries at once. We spoke about its downtown location, what a second ocean crossing might do to a bourbon, and how the experience will bring both sides of the story together.
The Story of Never Say Die
The brand is named after a colt foaled on co-founder Pat Madden’s family farm outside Lexington, Kentucky, who survived a difficult birth, during which whiskey was allegedly poured down his throat to revive him. Never Say Die went on to win the 1954 Epsom Derby at odds of 33-1, with Queen Elizabeth II in attendance.
One of the people who backed the horse was Mona Best, a Liverpool woman who pawned her jewelry to place the bet and used the winnings to help open the Casbah Coffee Club. The Beatles played some of their earliest gigs there, with her son Pete on drums.
That chain of events explains why Never Say Die combines Kentucky bourbon, horse racing, British pub culture and live music. Never Say Die was founded by Brian Luftman, Pat Madden, and British co-founders David Wild and Martha Dalton. The new brand home is intended to bring all four together, with good whiskey, good pints, and a good story.
The New Never Say Die Brand Home
Never Say Die has taken a two-floor building at 249 West Short Street. The site has its own distilled spirits plant license, making it one of the first micro-distilleries in downtown Lexington.
The English-inspired pub on the ground floor will serve British food alongside American favorites, with British drinks behind the bar and a decent showing of Kentucky bourbon. Tasting flights will be poured at one end of the bar, with a gift shop in a back corner.
The ticketed experience is upstairs and runs through four rooms: a library styled on 1950s Britain where the brand story is told, a tasting room, a barrel room modeled on a Kentucky rickhouse, and the still room. Tickets are expected to cost between $25 and $30.
The location immediately struck me. A building in the middle of a city is not where most Kentucky brand homes end up, but the choice was based on more than just footfall.
Why Never Say Die Chose Downtown, and Not the Bourbon Trail?
Most Kentucky brand homes sit some way out of town, strung along the Bourbon Trail and reached by car. Never Say Die has taken a building in the middle of Lexington instead, and Luftman’s thinking starts with how difficult it is to persuade people to make the trip at all.
“Marketing is tough, and getting people to drive to a destination is difficult,” he said.
Lexington was the obvious city because the racehorse was born on Pat Madden’s family farm nearby. Luftman is equally interested in who is already there.
“There’s a lot of tourism in Kentucky; it’s the horse racing capital of the world,” he said. “We have a lot of people that come to Lexington for horse racing, but they’re not necessarily looking for bourbon distilleries. So we figured they could stumble upon a really cool bar and say, what is this place?”
Racing and bourbon are the two industries Kentucky is known for, yet remarkably few brands have done much with both at once. Blanton’s has a horse and jockey on the stopper, but there is little else joining the two in any meaningful way.
“We have more ties to the horse industry than probably any other bourbon brand,” Luftman said.
Getting Britain Into the Building
I grew up in the English Midlands, close enough to White Peak that I could drive there in a little over an hour, so the English half of the building interested me more than the American one. I asked Luftman which parts of England were going in, and how he expected the place to feel once people were standing in it.
“Well, it terrifies me,” he said. “We think we’re doing it right with bringing in some English pub characteristics. That being said, I’m sure we’ll miss the mark, because it’s a bunch of Americans trying to figure that out.”
He has spent enough time in London to feel reasonably confident, and so has Pat Madden. The bar itself is being built from hickory.
“There will be beer on tap for an English-style pint, and a British-style fish and chips on the menu, with also an American burger,” he said.
Drink rails are going in outside for anyone who would rather stand with a glass in hand, and there will be a daily happy hour.
There will also be a stage for live music. “Music is a really big backbone of our story, the musical history of the brand,” Luftman said. Televisions showing sport will be around the room as well.
I told him the feeling of a British pub often matters more than the fittings. He agreed. “I think there’s going to be characteristics that make both sides of the pond pretty happy,” he said.
A Bar First, and a Brand Home Second
What sets the ground floor apart from most brand homes is that nobody is obliged to care about the brand. Luftman wants the room to work as a bar on its own terms, with the branding kept light and the sales pitch absent.
“We’re really focusing on making the bar really hip and awesome,” he said. “When you’re walking in, it’s not like, ‘welcome to the Never Say Die distillery, and here’s your experience.’”
The aim is for the discovery to feel organic, not overly corporate. Someone might notice the flights at the end of the bar, or the gift shop in the corner, and start asking questions.
“If they just want to come go to the coolest bar in Kentucky, they come in to our place, and then they start to learn what it’s about,” Luftman said.
That resonates with me. The first bourbon I tried was poured from a big bottle of Four Roses in a Manchester bar, and I remember it because I was out with friends. Whiskey memories attach themselves to places, and building a room people want to return to is a reasonable way to make some.
Never Say Die Double Ocean
The brand new Never Say Die Double Ocean Bourbon is the bottle meant to make the trip worth it. The labels had arrived the day before we spoke, and Luftman had taken sticker remover to an existing bottle to see how they looked on the glass.
Stranger & Stranger, which handles the brand’s packaging, designed the considerably changed look with gold lettering and a blue label on the back.
The whiskey will come from 30 hand-selected barrels currently sitting on pallets in Derbyshire, 25 of bourbon and five of rye, waiting on export paperwork before they are shipped back to Kentucky.
Luftman knows how the exercise sounds. “What a ridiculous thing to send bourbon barrels back from England to Kentucky again, but we’re so convinced that the ocean trip makes a difference that it’s gotta make it better,” he said.
Guests at the brand home will fill their own bottles from those barrels in the rickhouse room, and the whiskey will be sold nowhere else. There is no single proof statement, bottle count, or set of tasting notes because 30 barrels will be emptied by hand, one bottle at a time.
Luftman intends to keep Double Ocean as an ongoing release at the brand home. A Double Ocean Rye will follow, with a slightly purpler cast to the label.
What the Journey Does to the Whiskey
On the transatlantic crossing, Luftman believes that the journey changes the liquid through the movement of the whiskey against the heavily charred interior of the barrel.
“Have you ever seen the inside of a bourbon barrel? It’s like charred wood, it’s like black, almost a great charcoal,” he said. “So when you slosh that whiskey around that for six weeks at sea, and then it sits in this completely different climate, it’s undeniable that it’s going to change the whiskey.”
The team’s concern was that the change might not be an improvement. “We were concerned it would impart too much flavor, or maybe get some, like, kind of dank, humid type of notes, but it certainly has not.”
He describes the result as carrying plenty of caramel without becoming overwhelming. Once the barrels arrive at White Peak, the cooler Derbyshire climate also slows the more rapid maturation they would experience in Kentucky.
Bourbon rarely carries a high age statement because the Kentucky climate tends to push a barrel too far before it gets there. Once the whiskey leaves that environment, the math changes.
“We can ship our whiskey over there when it’s matured enough in Kentucky, and then we could age it in White Peak for, comfortably, five, ten years, and not feel like we’re degrading the whiskey at all,” Luftman said.
His longer-term ambition is to release “a bourbon over 15, 20 years that is still delicious,” although the oldest barrels are not there yet. Luftman smirked, “We’ll see what happens!”
Keeping It Simple, and Where Never Say Die Goes Next
I asked what else was in the works beyond Double Ocean and got a shorter answer than expected.
“Nothing, actually, and that’s not out of laziness or lack of creativity,” Luftman said. “We really want to keep this brand as simple as possible.” Barrel finishes and rotating limited editions are not part of the plan. “Our story’s unique enough. We don’t feel the need to like play games with bourbon.”
What he wants instead is predictability. “If they know they can pick up a bottle and it’s gonna taste like this, and it’s just gonna be just as good as the one five years ago, that’s our goal.”
I told him I found the restraint admirable, not least because adding finishes would probably mean pulling barrels out of England sooner, undoing the point of sending them there.
Growth, if it comes, is more likely to arrive as another building. Liverpool is the location he has in mind because the brand’s ties there run deep. He has never been, and I told him he would find it a friendly and lively city, and rather easier to reach than Derbyshire.
How Double Ocean would work in a second location he has not solved. “Maybe it’s a triple ocean,” he said.
The Long Shot
The last thing I asked was what he wants people to take with them when they walk back out onto the street. He did not reach for the whiskey.
“I want them to be inspired by an underdog story of triumph,” he said. “I can’t believe what one chain of events set into motion, where you could even make the case that The Beatles maybe would have never had their shot, and no one would have ever heard of them, if it wasn’t for the mother of the original drummer making a ridiculous bet on a 33-to-1 long shot.”
He is aware how much of that rests on one woman having a bad year and a good hunch. “She was down on her luck and pawned her jewelry, made a bet on this horse and changed the world, so why couldn’t I do that?”
For all the awards and coverage, Never Say Die remains a small brand, and Luftman is candid about it. “We don’t sell nearly the volume that I thought we would at this point,” he said. “It’s still a little bit of a niche product. I know it’s really good, and people fall in love with it once they learn about it, but there’s just not enough people that know about it.”
That, in the end, is what the building on West Short Street is for. Whether a British telephone box on a Kentucky sidewalk is the way to fix it, we will find out in the Fall.
Read the full article at Why Never Say Die Is Building an English Pub in the Heart of Bourbon Country
