Mark Coffman
In the late 1980s, when Lexington was better known for horses than hooch, a quiet engineer named Mark W. Coffman stepped into a role that would end up shaping one of the Bluegrass State’s most distinctive modern spirits stories. Coffman joined Alltech in 1986, a fast-growing, innovation-obsessed company that would eventually plant a brewery and, years later, light the stills that brought legal bourbon back to downtown Lexington. Over the decades that followed, Coffman’s name became woven into nearly everything fermenting, bubbling, aging, and quietly transforming at what is now Lexington Brewing & Distilling Co., home of Town Branch Distillery.
Those first years at Alltech read like a master class in building things from the ground up. Coffman didn’t just keep equipment humming; he designed and launched it. By the time Alltech expanded into beer and then whiskey, he had already built a career as the company’s Director of Engineering. He became, quite literally, the person who could design a plant, commission it, solve its most maddening problems, and then run it efficiently.
The bourbon chapter specifically began in earnest for Alltech when, in 2012, Town Branch Distillery opened on Cross Street. It was a twin-copper-pot-still showpiece that immediately joined the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and did something no one had done in Lexington for over a century: it made bourbon within the city limits. It also did something else unusual by pairing a full brewery with a distillery in one campus, letting visitors walk from mash tuns and hop aromas to fermenters and barrel warehouses in a single tour. That two-in-one identity would become part of Coffman’s daily reality, because he wasn’t just a Master Distiller, he remained a brewer at heart and in practice, forever toggling between two crafts that share a yeast-driven soul.
If 2012 was the lighting of the flame, the next few years were a steady stoking of it. Town Branch began rolling out whiskies that reflected both classical Kentucky instincts and some globe-crossing influences that traced back to Alltech’s late founder, Pearse Lyons, who had Irish roots and a restless curiosity. By 2015, Town Branch Rye, distilled on those Lexington pot stills and aged four years, arrived to widen the distillery’s profile. By 2019, Lexington Brewing & Distilling was marking 20 years of the beer side with a packaging refresh and plenty of cross-pollination, via barrels that once housed Town Branch bourbon holding stouts and ales before returning to cradle whiskey again.
In August 2024, curiosity and innovation caught up with Coffman again and Town Branch released three Ohio-exclusive bottles selected with the nearby state’s control agency. That kind of regional collaboration is a reminder that whiskey is both local and national at once; it leans on the limestone and the climate in the rickhouse, but it finds its people where they are. Coffman, still the same careful voice, still the same steady pair of hands, was there to usher those bottles out the door.
Mark Coffman was born to Barbara and the late William “Bill” Coffman in 1961. Mark has been married to his wife, Frieda, for many years, and the two have at least one adult son, but verifiable information on other family members is not available.
So the story, in order, runs like this: an engineer signs on with an ambitious Kentucky company in 1986; helps build and run plants across the globe; brings brewing and distilling together under one roof in 2012; layers rye and sherry-finished expressions onto the core bourbon; returns to the slow, steady labor of filling barrels and watching over them. Along the way, he talks just enough to leave a trail in podcasts, press quotes, and then he’s back to the stills. If bourbon is patience made visible, Mark Coffman’s career may be its blueprint: drafted carefully, revised often, and still very much in progress.
Sources:
Distillery Trail, “Town Branch,” distillerytrail.com
Lexington Brewing & Distilling - home page, lexingtonbrewingco.com
Acast podcast, “Bourbon Pursuit,” Season 1, Ep. 61, August 19, 2016
Alltech/home: news, September 21, 2018
Goodpods podcast, “Mark Coffman,” Season 3, Ep. 38, September 22, 2022
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee
