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.