Wally Dant

“Running It Off a Log”

John Wallace “Wally” Dant III, was born December 18, 1963. He is a modern Kentucky distiller with a story behind him. Wally is the founder and president of Log Still Distillery in Gethsemane, Kentucky, in southern Nelson County. There, he and his cousins have brought the land their family once worked back into the whiskey world with a new brand and a new image, but with a familiar, 200-year-old distilling name.

No stranger to the entrepreneurial side of commerce, Wally Dant previously owned and operated a wine and spirits distribution business in Tennessee called BonusBev, which he later sold to a larger distributor so he could concentrate his efforts on the Log Still project. But even before that, Wally had a long and distinguished career in the healthcare field.  He co-founded myNEXUS in 2014 as a specialty benefit management company working with insurance members that need services in the home. Prior to that, he was the co-Founder and CEO of Nashville’s SunCrest Healthcare, developing his home care and hospice company from start-up to approximately $100 million in revenue before its sale in December 2013.  Before that, he was a director with Navigant Consulting, a leading Tennessee healthcare consulting firm, and still prior to Navigant, Wally served as SVP-Operations for HCA’s home care division.

But the distilling side of Dant’s story starts many decades before Wally was born. In 1836, his ancestor Joseph Washington Dant, (known better as JW), began making bourbon in Kentucky. JW couldn’t afford a copper still, so he improvised by hollowing out a poplar log, running a pipe through it, heating the mash with steam, and distilling whiskey in that way. That rustic setup became known as “running it off a log,” and it’s the origin of the Log Still name today. By 1870, JW had turned his unusual but effective setup into a commercial distillery in what became known as Dant Station, Kentucky, where the Dant Distillery Company had a good business producing whiskey under the “JW Dant” name.

In the late 1800s, the Dant family became a whiskey dynasty. JW Dant had a large family of seven sons, all of whom were involved in distilling. Multiple branches of the family either helped run the original operation or opened new ones, including Cold Spring Distillery in Gethsemane, which became known for producing Yellowstone whiskey. Through the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Dants controlled several Kentucky distilleries and associated brands. The business stayed active even through Prohibition, when JW Dant obtained a coveted medicinal license and sold whiskey legally as “medicine” during those dark days when almost all distilleries shuttered and many never returned.

After Prohibition, different sons and grandsons revived various Dant-owned distilleries, renamed them, fought over names, and restarted production in Nelson and Marion counties. Unfortunately, eventually, like many family whiskey operations of that era, the business and trademarks were sold to larger operations. By 1943, all of the whiskey-related key assets as well as the “JW Dant” brand had passed out of direct family ownership. That meant that later generations of Dants grew up with strong whiskey instinct and heritage but without legal control of the old brand names. In fact, when Log Still Distillery was being organized, Heaven Hill, which today owns the JW Dant trademark, sued Log Still over how it referenced the Dant legacy in its materials. A federal court ultimately ordered Log Still not to use the “JW Dant” name as a current brand, though it recognized the family’s historical connection.

Nevertheless, in 2018, several members of the Dant family, including Wally Dant III, Lynne E. Dant, and Charles Douglas Dant, formally founded Log Still Distilling. The plan wasn’t just to put out bottles, it was to resurrect an entire destination on roughly 350 acres of rolling Kentucky farmland: a working distillery, tasting rooms, bed-and-breakfast lodging, a 2,300-seat outdoor amphitheater called The Amp, walking trails, a 12-acre lake, an events venue, and eventually even a functional train depot to echo the site’s rail history. Wally has described the endeavor as building “a new chapter for our family.”

Log Still’s spirits portfolio reflects that mix of heritage and storytelling. One whiskey line is called Monk’s Road, a nod to the country road that leads to the nearby Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery. Wally has said that, growing up, his family knew they were almost home, “when they turned onto Monk’s Road.” Another of Log Still’s more curious creations is Rattle & Snap Tennessee Whiskey. That offering is an unusual one because it is a legally-produced Tennessee whiskey coming from a Kentucky-based distillery. The whiskey is created using Tennessee sour mash traditions and the Lincoln County Process, perhaps a nod to Dant’s Nashville connection. Finally, Dant has created “Faithfully Crafted: the Trinity Blend Bourbon,” yet another Log Still project that is deeply tied to Wally Dant’s background. In December 2024, Log Still Distillery and the Archdiocese of Louisville announced Faithfully Crafted as a collaborative bourbon release as an ode to the shared roots of Catholicism and bourbon-making in central Kentucky, where Catholic settlers from Maryland arrived in the late 1700s, built parishes, and, very often, ran distilleries.