MORGANTOWN, West Virginia — This Saturday, Blue Lot Bourbon marks two years.
On July 11, 2024, Mike Greenblatt filed the paperwork that turned a tailgate tradition into a company.
Ask him where Blue Lot really began, though, and he will not point to a lawyer’s office.
He will point to a parking lot.
Anyone who has spent a fall Saturday in Morgantown understands the scene. Long before kickoff, friends gather, grills come alive, stories get repeated, and strangers become regulars. For Greenblatt, that ritual had a home in the Blue Lot.
He had been part of it for decades.
In 1980, when the new stadium opened and John Denver came to town to sing “Country Roads,” the lot was still mostly mud and gravel. Greenblatt was there. He never really left.
Before home games, Greenblatt and a rotating group of friends gathered in the same place and poured the same thing: a West Virginia-style jungle juice made with bourbon, apple cider, and a little champagne. The drink was not the point. The ritual was.
People came over. Friends brought friends. The regulars became family.
Blue Lot may be a young company, but the culture behind it is not. It is an artifact of hundreds of Saturdays, friendships, stories, and rituals accumulated over nearly half a century.
The idea to bottle it did not arrive in the lot. It arrived when the lot was empty.
Covid took a season away, and for a while it was not clear the tailgates were coming back at all. There was a real point when Greenblatt did not know whether he would get his Saturdays back. Somewhere in that absence, he made himself a promise: if he ever returned to the Blue Lot, he wanted a bourbon of his own waiting when he did.
That was the question underneath everything, the one that would not go away.
Could you bottle that?
Not the cocktail. The feeling. The place. The people. The ritual of a West Virginia game day — and, for one season, the fear of losing it.
Kevin, who makes the drive from Martinsburg for home games, remembers the same absence. “We spent years out there together, and then Covid took it and none of us knew if we’d get it back,” he said. “Mike went and made a bourbon — so now when we’re in the lot, we’ve finally got something that’s actually ours to raise.”
Greenblatt arrived in West Virginia in 1963, at four years old, after his father accepted a Tower Chief position in Charleston. His father, an air traffic controller at LaGuardia, had never visited the state before taking the job. What convinced him was a Field & Stream article describing West Virginia as home to some of the best trout fishing in the country. For a man in New York City, that was enough. He packed up the family and came south.
That kind of beginning leaves an impression. Greenblatt grew up seeing West Virginia not as a place to escape, but as a place his family chose. He graduated from West Virginia University in 1981 and never stopped considering the state home.
“If you grow up here, you grow up watching other people tell you who you are,” Greenblatt said. “We are always the bridesmaid, always the punchline somebody else already wrote, always wearing other people’s logos. I wanted one thing that was unmistakably ours.”
So he built it.
Tailgate Spirits LLC, the company behind Blue Lot, was incorporated on July 11, 2024. Seven weeks later, on August 29, the first order was delivered, just ahead of football season.
The premise was simple but not easy: create a bourbon with a genuine West Virginia identity without borrowing anyone else’s name, logo, mascot, or permission.
Blue Lot was never intended to be official anything. It was meant to belong to the people who understood the reference.
With the brand in market and the bourbon finding its audience, Greenblatt could have left the liquid alone. Instead, he went looking for better.
He found it at Green River Distilling Co. in Owensboro, Kentucky, a distillery with roots dating to 1885 and a growing national reputation among serious bourbon drinkers.
Greenblatt did not simply buy a bottle. He went to the distillery behind it and selected his own six-year single barrel.
“Good wasn’t good enough,” he said. “Nobody made me do it. It was selling. But I didn’t want a bourbon that was good for West Virginia. I wanted one that was good, period. Something West Virginians could be proud of.”
That decision mattered. But the production decision may matter more.
Blue Lot is distilled in Kentucky, then shipped in sealed barrels to Summersville, West Virginia. There, it is brought to bottling proof with West Virginia spring water, bottled, labeled, and prepared for market. Blue Lot 100 Proof is a West Virginia Grown certified product.
It costs more to do it that way. Every barrel has to travel. Every additional production step adds expense. Greenblatt could bottle closer to the source and simplify the economics.
He chooses not to.
His father crossed state lines for West Virginia’s water. Two generations later, the son will not let the bourbon carry the state’s name until it has come home to be finished in it.
“A bourbon that calls itself ours has to actually come home before it reaches the bottle,” he said. “Kentucky distilled it. West Virginia made it ours.”
That line is as close as Blue Lot has to a creed.
Greenblatt describes the brand in two words: Culture, Bottled. He insists it is not a slogan, and the distinction matters. The bourbon is the vehicle. The real product is the feeling behind it: local pride without institutional affiliation, familiar culture without borrowed intellectual property, and a bottle that gives West Virginians something of their own to put on the table.
Two years in, Blue Lot remains a young company in a difficult business. Alcohol is heavily regulated. Premium spirits are crowded. Building a brand around local culture can be easy to imitate on the surface and hard to execute underneath.
Greenblatt is 66, old enough to know how hard this business is. At an age when many people are looking for ways to slow down, he started a new company in one of the most competitive consumer categories in the country. His wife and friends ask him, gently, why take this on now.
“Because West Virginia earned it,” he said. “And I wasn’t willing to wait for somebody else to get around to it.”
The first home Saturday of the 2026 season arrives September 5. By then, the grills will be lit again. The stories will be told again. The Blue Lot will fill up again — with people who know exactly how this bourbon started, and people who are about to find out. Both belong there.
And somewhere in the middle of it, Greenblatt will likely be where he has spent much of the last four decades: in the lot, with friends, talking about a bourbon that started there.
Not because it was the easiest business to build.
Because, in his view, it was worth bringing home.
Blue Lot® Bourbon is distilled in Kentucky and proofed, bottled, and labeled in Summersville, West Virginia. Learn more at bluelotbourbon.com.
