Bourbon Trail 5-7

We took another weekend off to finish up the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and bring you our pictures and other findings.  After our previous efforts we were better versed in what to expect and since we were focused purely on bourbon (and not the Kentucky Derby) we had time to hit five distilleries instead of four and to spend a lot more time at each.  Between that and an itchier camera-finger, we came back with enough pictures to put on Flickr.  That set also includes the pictures from our first Bourbon Trail venture.

We met up again with our friends in Cincinnati and headed out bright and early on a Saturday morning to arrive at Jim Beam for our first tour.

 Their visitor's center is bigger than one whole distilling operation we later saw.

Jim Beam is the largest bourbon producer and they have a very large, very industrial operation to back it and proved not to be without personality.  We had reservations for a tour (you need a bus to get around the plant and it has a finite number of seats) and our perky but professional tour guide got things started right on time.  As someone in graduate school in an education-related field, I noted that the tour here followed a number of education best practices, including stating learning objectives and the motivations for them at the beginning, clearly linking each part of the tour to objectives and the intended take-aways, repetition of key facts throughout the narrative, quizzes to check comprehension and retention as well as to incite engagement with the material (testing in and of itself can focus the student on things they don't know when the test exposes that weakness), honestly encouraging questions and addressing them fully and respectfully, and instructor excitement and engagement with the material.  And yes, I thought it was dorky that I noted all that without trying to.

 Ana smells their un-aged distillate (moonshine)

 A few million gallons of fermenting mash.

 Freaking enormous still (six stories tall I believe)

 They tapped a single barrel bourbon in front of us, but we only got to smell that glass.

 They keep two bottles from each batch they bottle for a couple of years for quality control purposes, and according to our tour guide the employees get it when the time is up.

 Fortunately we're good enough friends that we can share samples, and thus sample almost everything they had to offer.  Our verdict: the Knob Creek Reserve and the Knob Creek Rye were both quite good.  The ladies liked the flavored ones (black cherry, honey, and cinnamon) but they smelled like cough syrup to me and I was there for bourbon, not candy, so I passed.

After finishing the Jim Beam tour and tasting, we felt we needed to build a base for further sampling and retired to a local BBQ place called Down Home Bar-B-Q  that the internet said was good.

 The internet was right!  They started us off with fried cornbread pancakes...

 ...and followed up with very, very tender and flavorful BBQ.  Both the ribs and the pulled pork I tried were more tender than even good BBQ tends to be, and unlike a lot of these types of places, everyone agreed that the sides were of high quality.  I ate a ton.

After lunch we went to Heaven Hill but they didn't have a tour for a while so we went literally a mile down the road to Willet Distillery instead, the smallest operation we visited that weekend (part of the Craft Trail rather than the bigger Bourbon Trail).

As mentioned, their whole operation is about the size of Jim Beam's visitor's center.

 They were obviously putting a lot of money into the place - the name and still had been fully reactivated only in the last year or so, and it is obvious they have big plans.

 Their single sizeable but not overwhelming still.

 Fermentation vats

 Their water source is a natural lake right next to the distillery that comes from a natural limestone spring.  The color seems a little weird but they offered water they said came from it and it tasted just fine.

Willet offers a less polished but perhaps more personal tour, and they don't seem to be shy about telling you things that have been going right or wrong for them as they shift back into gear and add more facilities.  Their signature bourbon is really very good indeed, with an interesting but not overwhelming woody bitterness in the finish.  I wasn't 100% sure I loved it, but it was very unusual and I surely didn't not like it - bourbon people would do well to taste it for themselves given the chance.

After finishing the tour and tasting at Willet, we went to Heaven Hill, the most commercial of the operations we saw.  Smaller than Jim Beam in bourbon production, I believe their overall output is much higher since they make basically every kind of hard liquor under the sun.  Their tour doesn't actually go into a distillery (they don't have one on the tour site) so they basically show a video and take you through a rickhouse before going to the tasting.  The tour was pleasant enough and certainly not bad but of the full tours we went on this was probably the most disposable to my thinking.

 Rickhouses are pretty cool from the standpoint of structural engineering.  They are often six or seven stories high, and given their contents are densely packed barrels, are basically holding a giant cube of bourbon.  They are built almost entirely out of wood because metal can spark if you hit it and bourbon can explode.  Heaven Hill lost a still and some other structures (and 90,000 barrels of bourbon) a few years back to a fire.  The news reports of the time say the flames were 35 stories high and the firefighters couldn't even get close to it.  Apparently if you unload one side of a rickhouse while the other side still has bourbon on it, they tend to tip over.

 Heaven Hill has more than a few of them though, and this isn't their only site.

 They have a fun tasting bar shaped like a barrel.  Ana got the low seat.

 The tour guide gave a fun little talk about the various bourbons to be tasted.  We didn't get to try anything unusual (I've previously purchased everything we tried) but everything we did try was good bourbon.  The Evan Williams single barrel can either be an astonishing value or I'd-rather-not-drink-it depending on the barrel and the one at this tasting was in the middle, solid but not outstanding.

After Heaven Hill, we headed to our hotel (saved having to drive two and a half hours back that night and forward the next morning) and then headed out to dinner at a fairly fancy contemporary restaurant named Circa.  The men in the party apparently knew what to pick because our appetizers and entrees were both very good (Caprese salad, marmalade salmon, coq au vin).  The ladies both felt their different apps were OK and the verdict on their entrees was that one was pretty good but the other one just didn't work (duck breast stuffed with vegetables).  I tested the duck breast and agree - the flavors just didn't work together.  The atmosphere was casual but quiet and dignified and the service was comfortably professional. Overall I think the place is very close to being outstanding; some elements of the menu need to be improved or replaced to eliminate the weak choices we encountered.  We had a good time regardless and their bread pudding dessert was so good and so large that we all got a great dessert out of a single serving.

The next morning we headed down to Maker's Mark, which is far and away the most scenic of all the distilleries we saw, with the most personality in their structures.  They are way out in the countryside, and the whole place feels like it.

 Ana petted their cats, obviously tame and fed, hanging around the house where the tour starts.

 They have a lot of antique buildings, paths, walls, etc and the whole place is very green.

 Field behind the distillery

 Note the porch and fancy trim on their still building

 The Maker's Mark tour tends to focus on what makes Maker's different than other bourbons, which is nice because we've heard how bourbon is made several times at this point.

 Their tasting room is quite stylish.  Maker's Mark only makes one bourbon, so the tasting is their white dog (unaged distillate), their regular bourbon, and a new variation on their main product that uses additional wood in the aging process.  It has been a few years since I last tasted their product, and it was better than I remembered, really very respectable bourbon.  I suspect this change is due to having tried a lot more bourbons since then. Previously I would have been comparing it to the flavors I expected from scotch, not a fair comparison.

From Maker's we headed first to lunch and then to Buffalo Trace, a very large operation that produced a large number of my favorite types of bourbon (I didn't even know they made half of these labels).  According to our guide, they basically only use three basic recipes for their bourbons (these can be very different bourbons) and all remaining differences for the 17 kinds of bourbon they produce are due to differences in aging.

 They have a bronze buffalo and their grounds tend to be pretty well landscaped, lots of different gardens everywhere you go.

Active warehouse on the right side of this picture has been in use since 1881 or something like that, Buffalo Trace got a waiver during Prohibition to produce 'medicinal whiskey' for those who could get a prescription, which they say makes them the oldest continuously active distillery in the US.

 All Blanton's bourbon is aged in a single rickhouse, the red one in the middle there.  All Buffalo Trace rickhouses have different colors, shapes, quantities of windows, etc, to allow for a wide varieties of aging climates and a consequent variety of boubon tastes.  The difference is quite surprisingly profound

 Buffalo Trace also claims to be the most decorated bourbon distiller and I am not aware of any who dispute them.

 Quality control samples in the Blanton's & Eagle Rare bottling line.

 Wouldn't want to forget where you put which whiskey!

 They were selling 1.75L containers for not a whole lot more than a standard 0.75L container would cost (benefits of cutting out the middleman I suppose) so I bought one for each hand.  I don't believe the picture does justice to how big these are - I am not going to have to buy bourbon for quite a while I think. 

Ana got a 'bourbon cream' which is basically Bailey's but with premium bourbon for the alcohol content and with higher overall quality - the tasting demonstrated it with root beer and I'm pretty sure it is just the thing to add to root beer floats. When my enormous new bottles eventually run dry, I will need to find some of the other things they make and try them; they seem to have a preponderance of superlative whiskeys.  Buffalo Trace was the final distillery we visited (technically Maker's was the last one we needed to complete the official Bourbon Trail) and I would definitely recommend it - a very pleasant venue, tour, and tasting.  Just the thing to fortify us for returning to work the following day.

As previously mentioned, more pictures can be found on Flickr.