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.