About
Family-owned distillery at Huber's Orchard in Borden, Indiana (7th-generation farm, est. 1843). Known for innovative bourbon finishes using brandy, port, and wine casks from their own winery. Carl Huber's double-oaked and finished bourbons have developed a devoted following.
Production Details
The Starlight Tale
In the rolling hills of southern Indiana, where the Ohio River carves its ancient path toward the Mississippi, the Huber family has worked the same Clark County soil for seven generations. What began as a homestead in 1843 has grown into something more ambitious—a place where the frontier spirit of making-do has evolved into the art of making-better.
The limestone beneath their feet tells the story. The same bedrock that filters Kentucky's most famous waters extends north across the river, blessing the Huber wells with the mineral-rich character that bourbon demands. When Carl Huber decided to add distillation to the family's orchard and winery operations in 2001, he wasn't breaking new ground so much as returning to old traditions—most nineteenth-century farms distilled something.
But Carl brought a vintner's patience to whiskey-making. The barrels aging in Starlight's rickhouses aren't just filled and forgotten. They're moved, finished, and coaxed through secondary maturation in casks that once held the family's own port and brandy. This isn't the mass production of industrial distilling—it's the careful tending that comes from generations of understanding how time and wood transform grain.
The stills themselves stand as monuments to American ingenuity, producing bourbon that honors tradition while embracing innovation. Double-oaking adds layers of vanilla and spice. Wine barrel finishes introduce notes no Kentucky master distiller ever imagined. Each experiment builds on the last, creating whiskeys that taste unmistakably of this place—Indiana earth, limestone water, and the restless creativity of American craft distilling.
The devoted following that Carl has cultivated speaks to something larger than clever marketing. In an age when craft distilleries bloom and wither like seasonal crops, Starlight endures because it grows from deep roots. The Huber family didn't chase the whiskey boom—they simply added another chapter to their century-and-three-quarters story of working this land.
Standing in their stillhouse today, surrounded by the sweet mash and copper gleam, you can feel both the weight of tradition and the pull of possibility that defines American whiskey's new frontier.