Frederick Stitzel’s barrel racks, 1879

Reaching a bottom barrel meant taking the whole line apart, the weight made the lower barrels leak, and poor air flow could leave whiskey musty after a hot summer. Louisville distiller Frederick Stitzel, working on the problem at the Glencoe Distillery, patented a fix in 1879: timber frames with projecting rails, so every barrel rested on its own ledge with air all around it and any one could be rolled out without disturbing the rest.

The racks stood free of the building's walls, and insurance maps of the era started labeling such buildings "patent warehouses." The rick system is still the standard in Kentucky rickhouses, and the family name carried on: the A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery later joined W. L. Weller & Sons, and Stitzel-Weller opened in Shively on Derby Day 1935.

Stitzel’s racks came eighteen years before E. H. Taylor Jr.’s Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897. The map pin marks the surviving buildings of the Stitzel Brothers Distillery at 25th and Maple streets in western Louisville; the site of the Glencoe Distillery is not mapped.