The Ross & Squibb distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana has been making whiskey since the 1840s. Under Seagram, then LDI, then MGP, it became the invisible engine of the American whiskey boom: a place where anyone with a label and a purchase order could buy well-made bourbon and rye.\n\nIts 95% rye recipe became so widespread that drinkers learned to recognise it blind. Follow the dashed sourcing lines in the family tree and you will find them converging, again and again, on one campus by the Ohio River.

Brown-Forman sold Early Times to Sazerac in 2020. Beam Suntory became Suntory Global Spirits. Campari bought Wild Turkey in 2009, and Wilderness Trail in 2022. A bourbon label rarely tells you who signs the cheques.\n\nThis project keeps every ownership claim attached to a source and a confidence level, because the answer to "who owns this?" has an expiry date.

Pappy Van Winkle is not a distillery. It is a family, a recipe philosophy and, since 2002, a joint venture with Sazerac that produces the whiskey at Buffalo Trace in Frankfort.\n\nThe older bottles trace back to Stitzel-Weller in Shively, closed as a production distillery in 1992. Understanding the difference between those eras is the whole point of a family tree.