The Bourbon Trail 1-4

Following our Kentucky Derby adventure we toured four of the seven distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail: Town Branch, Four Roses, Wild Turkey, and Woodford Reserve.  The Bourbon Trail is really just a marketing thing that some bourbon producers cooked up rather than a real 'trail' since you can visit them in any order, but there are a large number in a relatively compact area.  They also have a booklet that you can get stamps in - collect all the stamps and get a free T-shirt.  Ana was all over that stuff as my experience suggests she'll go out of her way to get something stamped even when no gratis clothing is involved.

 Fortunately, one member of our party is more of a beer guy than a lover of bourbon and he graciously DD'd the rest of us.  We drove down from Cincinnati to that area, first visiting Town Branch distillery, which I'd never heard of because most of their distribution is local. 

Town Branch is an old name that has recently been re-activated after a long period of disuse, and they have a very shiny new distillery and visitor's center to go with it.  Apparently a business owner originally bought and re-activated it to make beer and hooch for the employees of his other, larger company, but then realized the product was good enough to commercialize and they've met with some success there as well.  All the pictures we have were from Town Branch.

This open fermentation vat's contents actually go into the final product.  They'd prefer you didn't touch it.

At the end of all of these kind of tours the samples come out, and Town Branch's bourbon seemed good but nothing particularly distinctive. They also make a barley-based whiskey (i.e. it would be Scotch if it came from Scotland) but either they were watering the samples of this product or perhaps the sample hadn't been aged fully yet, because it was clearly very wet indeed, well past the point of being smooth into the realm of dilution.  Possibly they'd had ice cubes that had melted into them before we arrived? Finally, they served Bluegrass Sundown, a coffee/bourbon concentrate that Ana would highly recommend for your liquored coffee needs, and she doesn't even like coffee.

After Town Branch we went to Four Roses, which was the best of the bunch all day in both quality and quantity.  Four Roses was bought by a major Japanese company a few decades back and they've shipped almost all of their products exclusively to Japan since that time, only selling in the US again in the last few years.  As recent residents of Japan, we'd encountered their products before, since Four Roses is what you are most likely to find behind a Japanese bar as far as bourbon is concerned. We also found it in a Japanese Burger King. We'd mostly tried their lower end so far.  At the distillery they issues us glasses and bade us sample I believe four different grades, from their standard up through the current single-barrel they had tapped, and I was very impressed with most of them for complexity and pleasing flavor.  I prefer mellower bourbons and Four Roses delivered tasty and complex flavors at all price points; I don't think it was the previous samples talking.

After Four Roses we needed some lunch, so we stopped at a genuine Kentucky fried chicken restaurant (not a KFC) and bought way, way more fried chicken and biscuits and so forth than we needed.  It was cheap, filling, hot (not a warm day) and while not part of the most rarefied realms of epicurean fantasy, pretty good.

After lunch we hit Wild Turkey, which has a big tour but a really small visitor's center (they're building a new one but it isn't done yet), by far the largest distillery we visited.  Their warehouses for aging whiskey are very large and very numerous, and they offered us something like seven products to try but each person could only get two samples - easily fixed by a group of four that doesn't mind sharing.  Their top-end products are good but I'd probably add a little water to them to calm things down a bit. They also made a rye whiskey in the Irish style which is apparently hard to come by and was a pleasant and interesting change from the range of relatively similar and moderately generic bourbons presented.  Not bad at all, but not exemplars of the styles I favor.

Our final distillery of the day was Woodford Reserve, which certainly has the most scenic surroundings (drove past a lot of horse country and horse barns that certainly cost several times as much as our house) and the most scenic distillery proper.  The flip side is they pretty much only make one bourbon so there isn't much new to sample if you've tried it before, but by this point in the day we weren't too disappointed to encounter a dearth of options.  My opinion of their product is right around Town Branch - it is right-down-the-center quality bourbon and not very distinctive.

Based on how the highways are oriented down there, we had a two-plus hour drive back to Cincinnati to pick up our car and return to Lafayette, so by the time we left our DD behind there was no problem getting home.

Of the distilleries visited, I'd recommend the products coming out of Four Roses the most, probably followed by Wild Turkey (at least their high-end stuff).  The other two aren't bad but if you're already paying for quality bourbon you might as well get the best and most interesting, in my book.  We plan to hit the other three on the official Bourbon Trail and maybe the seven on the Craft Bourbon Trail too later this summer, so I may have more input on this topic in the future.

Kentucky Derby and the Bourbon Trail

We finished our first academic year here and did something non-work-related to celebrate before starting up the summer term.  Living in Lafayette we're about two and a half hours to Cincinnati, where some of our friends from college live, and from there it is only a few hours more to areas of Kentucky containing the Kentucky Derby and the Bourbon Trail.  I suspect most readers can see how this could be the germ of an excellent weekend trip.

We drove to Cincinnati Friday night, hung out, and drove together to Louisville for the Derby on Saturday.  It was looking pretty wet outside and as we were only going for infield tickets (which are much cheaper but roofless) we stopped at a pretty decent barbeque restaurant a few miles from the Derby called Smoketown and ate a big lunch first.  Afterwards as it was still raining we went to downtown Louisville looking for a bourbon bar but being Derby day everything was closed so we headed out to stand in the mud and look at horses.

The parking situation was a little confused but we eventually figured it out and we probably only had to walk about fifteen minutes from where we parked, which is pretty good when you park for free and many tens of thousands of other people are going to the same place you are.  And let me tell you about those tens of thousands of other people: They. Were. Drunk.  While the stands and boxes at the Derby have a dress code (jackets and ties for men, seriously not optional) the infield is basically an enormous fraternity party except the drinks are using good bourbon instead of bad vodka.  As many of these people did dress up a little prior to joining this party, it was a lot like a better-dressed and more inebriated county fair.

It seems that most people with infield tickets are definitely not there for the horses, because 1) you can't hear the loudspeakers saying what is going on, 2) small screens showing the action are few and far between, and most importantly 3) the few people who were there for the racing brought tarps and fastened them to the fencing along the entire length of the infield to create tents, meaning that they blocked the view around the entire infield area except for a few sections of fence kept clear for emergency vehicle access.  If you want to actually see horse racing at the Kentucky Derby in person, I recommend you shell out the big bucks and wear your suit jacket to sit in the stands (or the boxes if you won the lottery).  Everyone else was there for the party and with the mint juleps being cheap, powerful, and good plenty of people were out of it enough to be calling it a day well before the 6:30 main event started.

My understanding is that the box seats over there start at over $1,000 go for up to $32,000 per person.  The stands are only hundreds of dollars each.  It was $66 for the two of us to get into the mud party.

Not above those mint juleps ourselves, either.

We worked our way towards the front of the people watching through the fence near an emergency access area, so we did in fact see about four seconds of the Derby, in person and for ourselves.  I believe we were in agreement that in the future we'd be OK to watch from a bar instead of standing in a field, but for a one-time experience it was fine and we were much drier and better prepared than most people who hadn't checked the weather.

 This is the best view of the racetrack we got.  I'm not sure why they didn't put some stands in the infield or at least stop people with tarps from blocking the view, but it was all standing all the time.

 This is a screen showing the action that is visible from the infield, and it is not very large - this is on maximum zoom with the camera.

 This screen also fuzzed into unintelligibility shortly before the Derby actually started, but they did fix it before the race began.

 Horses go by for a few seconds - yay!

Once the Derby was in the books we headed back to Cincinnati and ate terrific Indian food for dinner.  The next day was looking just as wet or wetter, but the rain matters a lot less when you're inside touring distilleries.  The next entry will be on the Bourbon Trail, of which we did a portion the following day.

Dispatches from Last Fall

This piece of local color brought to you back from the dim and musty archives of at least four months ago.  The laptop that had the pictures on it was on the fritz and then out for service and, well, here they are.

Anyway, we have two mature maples that cover at least half of our lot. They are fantastic during the summer because they shade the house pretty much entirely during summer afternoons, cutting the cooling bill nicely. They also had great color last fall.

The downside is that clearing out those leaves after they fell took us ten man-hours to get the roughly 85% we actually cleared out, me with the rake and Ana with the leaf blower.  The rest wasn't worth going after, being under the ivy, etc.

This pile was better than waist-high on me (Lee) in the middle and probably thirty feet long.  On the plus side, we didn't have to bag it or anything - the street department just comes along on your regular trash day and the pile vanishes, no need to call or extra charges or anything.  We felt both the pictures of the leaves on the trees and off them were worth showing. The trees are great about 364 days of the year, when I am not moving their several million fallen leaves.

Cat Sweater

As part of Ana's ongoing program of transitioning into being a crazy cat lady*, we present the following pictures.

 One suspiciously cat-sized sweater.

  

One unsuspecting cat.

 

 Can't you tell she just loves it?

 Apparently she finds it so soothing that she feels the need to lie down on the ground and not get up until the sweater is removed.**

*The sweater was actually a test knit and was a mini-scale version of one intended for people - neither the pattern nor the product was originally intended for cats.  Didn't stop us.

**No cats were harmed in the preceding process. Physically, at least. No guarantees on possible psychological ramifications.

Fun with Electricity

It's pretty obvious an amateur handyman lived here before us - there are a lot of things of shall we say do-it-yourself quality.  Over time, some of these items will likely find their way onto the blog.  In this entry we felt we'd share a few anecdotes about the configuration of the house's electrical system.

The breaker box is not only messy, but also completely labeled in a fashion best described as 'false'. There are two breakers labeled "Washer". When we had to turn off the circuit the washer was actually connected to, it remained powered up with both of those breakers open; neither of them were correct. We have to figure out which breaker connects to which circuit, and then probably clean up the wiring.  There are a number of circuits which don't actually connect to anything anymore - those would be logical places to start.

OK, so this isn't amateur, but can someone tell me what it is?  I'm not certain if it is power or like an old phone line or something but I'm pretty sure I don't need one in my living room. 

Finally, we have an epic tale of frustration and confusion centered around our water softener. We have a fairly old water softener that came with the house, which is good because the water here is quite hard, but it also predates the age of manuals being on the internet and the like.  It didn't seem to be working right, so we called a guy to come out and take a look at it and show us how to actually operate it. Aside from being old, he pronounced the device in perfect health.

After that, we'd hoped that everything would be peachy in the hard water department.  However, a few days later we started getting the white residue on our dishes that is typical of hard water again.  We looked in the salt bin and it was pretty apparent it wasn't actually using any appreciable quantity of salt.  It made all the right sounds and the gears of the clock turned on their own, etc, so we really couldn't figure it out.  We also adjusted the settings a few times thinking that maybe that was the problem, though when we did the math the original settings were pretty reasonable.  This went on for maybe a month or six weeks.  We manually initiated cycles every couple of days, which seemed to work.

Eventually, Ana was coming up the stairs after once again manually re-setting the clock and cycle, and realized that when she turned off the basement light, the water softener shut off. Apparently, they had the softener on the same circuit as the lights. The water softener is now working fine.  Our temporary solution has been simply to only screw in the bulb when we want light down there, and there are a number of other things that need permanent fixes before we get to that.

My question is, did the previous owners unscrew the light bulb for the past 15 or so years they've had that softener, only turn it on when they wanted it to work, did they just not realize it wasn't running?  The world may never know.

YouTube PhD Projects

We're taking mostly the same classes at the moment, the basic classes for Engineering Education (ENE). This is a very interesting department, filled with all kinds of people from very diverse backgrounds. Engineering Education wasn't something you could get a degree in until Purdue started its School of Engineering Education in 2004. Due to how young the program is, the wide-ranging interests of the faculty, the wide-open nature of what you do with a degree in this area, and the fact that we're being trained to have not just a research interest but also an ability to discuss with the public and influence policy, we get some interesting program requirements and projects.

Towards some of those desired outcomes, one of our recent class projects was to work in a group and create a YouTube video on the topic(s) of engineering and engineering education. Ana's is more informative and authoritative, while Lee's is,well, less so, but more fun.

First up, Ana's, a voice-over presentation that starts a bit slow and is geared towards high schoolers considering engineering or undergraduate students who aren't yet sure about this whole engineering thing:

Yes, Ana is the voice-over (Lee - and she did it in one continuous take)

Next, Lee's. His team wanted something memorable and funny that would have a chance of going viral amongst technical faculty, and went a bit lighter on the historical and philosophical elements.  His group cut down and re-captioned an Iron Chef episode and made one of the funniest things this department has ever seen, though some of the jokes are technical or specific to engineering education. Make sure you turn captions on if they aren't on already! If you're not sure what to do, click the square in the bottom-right corner of the video, then click on the "CC" button in the bottom-right corner. Even if you understand the Japanese, that is not what the captions say at all!

 

 Amazing, no?

Many people in the department said the Iron Prof video was probably one of the best videos in the five years they've been doing this project.  Faculty may have cried with laughter at the presentation. If you want to take a look at some more such videos, the entire list of all of the ENE videos can be found here.

The third and final YouTube video we're presenting here is from some students in a section of Honors First-Year Engineering that Lee is a part of teaching (about the Honors First-Year Engineering program he is a part of teaching), and was not done for this or any other assigned project. We think it is pretty funny as well, and put it in for your enjoyment.  Note from Lee - in my professional opinion, the class they are singing about is in fact brutally difficult and life-consuming, as it is intended to be.  They are learning so much, and are really great students that are generally a pleasure to work with.  Apparently, some can also sing.

As a final note - this is not what we do all day.  Mostly we read, write, and discuss research papers.  YouTube is not yet a professionally acceptable mode of publication for scientific discourse.  Comments that we're going to school to make internet videos may result in you being forced to read our recent literature reviews on the topics of extant K-12 engineering design cycles and the uses of intelligent tutoring systems for engineering education.  They are pretty dry.  You have been warned.


 

It's Been Awhile, Again

Well, we said posting would be minimal, and we weren't lying! We're a month in to the semester, and things are very busy. Working, reading, trying to keep some level of social life (it would be nice to know some people over the next three years) and sanity, meals...we're making sure it all gets at least sort of done, but our schedules are definitely overfull. We've been taking the bus, which gives us some time in the morning and afternoon to do something non-work related (Lee: or as also happens, more work stuff), and have been getting stuff done around the house when we can. We've had a few things going on at the same time, with some setbacks in each as happens with such things, but have finally finished the front garden!

 Starting point. Some scraggly plants, a lot of weeds, everything patchy and overgrown.

We had hoped to get a lot further with the outside areas by this point, but we've got Virginia Creepers. Some people, myself (Ana) included, react to this plant as if it were poison ivy. We learned this the hard way, and consequently did not have as much gardening (or anything else) done as we originally intended, as I was having severe allergic reactions and Lee was sick. Knowing what we wanted out of the grounds, in general, we asked for some landscaping advice from Lee's professional parents and picked up a (very full) car load of plants when we visited New Hampshire before classes started. We hoped to get things in the ground quickly, but classes started and daylight hours at home with time to spare have been minimal. We started by digging up the big things we didn't want in there and Freecycling the ones that were good but not for us. Then we outlined the desired space with some rope:

After cutting out the edge and tweaking it until we liked it, we sprayed the area with weed killer to get all the grass and other undesirables out. It took roughly two weeks before it killed what it was supposed to kill, so we waited until we had this:

Almost ready. We would need to till in some compost to make the soil better for our plants and break up the existing dead roots, but we also needed to dig up the drainage pipe that was connected to the gutter downspouts. These pipes are fairly common in this area to help rainwater drain away from the house. Ours was buried too close to the the surface (showed through in several places) and had a fairly ugly opening on the end:

For our nice 3-day Labor Day weekend, we planned to dig up the old drainage pipe, bury it deeper, till the front garden area to prepare it for planting, and maybe start putting things into the ground. That did not exactly go as planned.

We did manage to get the pipe out and re-buried. The two days we were working on this, it rained. Poured. It was very, very wet. We played in the mud anyway. The real problem was finding a second pipe system underneath the first one (were we wanted the first one to be), so after determining that the second pipe system served no purpose (Lee: I'm 99% sure it was an improperly installed French drain - tilted uphill, bone-dry on the inside during a rainstorm) we ended up digging out all of one and most of a second, since they were both in the way of planting. The first pipe runs along the entire length of the house, coming from the back gutter drainpipe to the front. Eventually, we got it all out, and back in, and the sun shone all Monday when we were back inside doing the homework we didn't do Saturday and Sunday because we were out in the mud. Of course. At least it was done, and done right, and just about ready to plant.

 Now we just needed to figure out exactly where our plants were supposed to be. We played around with a few configurations, placing the pots here and there, and Skyped home to Lee's parents to get some more input and be sure we were placing each plant in a pleasing place, far enough away from its neighbors that when they start filling in, they won't be overcrowded.

We tilled, planted, re-planted a couple that weren't quite in the right spot, and mulched. Now we just need to keep it all watered and happy, and in a year or two, we should have quite the front display!

Now to make the rest of the property look as good. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.